Poetry by Winnie Zeng

        Stephen A. Wolfe CC




Imagery 

Under an overpass of dim dusk, a curtain shop 
owner has dinner inside. On the overpass, 
traffic rushes for evening, and manages a peak 
of his solitude to be later deja vu. 

All street lamps turn on at six. 
Triangles of darkness stand in between 
every two lights, at whose edge 
moths scurry for another form of home. 

The effect of speed – what a vehicle illustrates 
as it mutates the quality of air. 
To command a change in life, its difficulty 
is mirrored by the shop’s rolling shutter. 

After the beep to switch off scooter, 
a worker’s rustle upstairs with assorted plastic. 
A window lights up in yellow (blocking 
excessive output) or LED white 

(breakup of thoughts, eating straight out of a pot). 
Half a year after the flood, they found a fish 
alive in one of the lamps. Given promises wild,
its recurrent rain and foreseeable light.

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Property Development

Your poem could be like a misjudged property 
development in sparsely populated outskirts of town –– 
terminal stop of a new subway line, expensive campus 
failed to recruit students. 

The exterior, timid among spring blossoms, 
only fits in the landscape when rain falls. 
Getting comfortable in a new body, its limbs withdraw 
as variegated lights come on.

Or it is your life, destiny. The insides painted in a hurry 
by under-paid workers, peels in awkward aloneness. 
They have left remarks under the top layer of cement, 
your personal memory.

At dusk, wandering cats and dogs gather, darken
the blue of sky through a gradient they have co-created.
Now apparent, waiting is no more than watching others 
grow, go elsewhere.

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Winnie Zeng writes and translates from Zhejiang, China. Her translation of Ma Yan’s poetry has been a finalist for the Anne Frydman Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Gabo Prize in Literary Translation. Other work can be found in Poetry Northwest, the Offing, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.