BY ZUYI ZHAO
Monday evening, the face
of an unsightly girl
looks at anyone but you.
There is someone growing
from your shoulder
whose dreams are why you know her.
A train to China roars
on its tracks, revering the traces
of tigers
who still roam
among the treeless towers
of Beijing, hungering—
A woman
gives birth and there is no father
standing beside her.
The sound
of her daughter’s first cry crackles
with the gramophones
of a funeral and a wedding
waking to life,
and the priest asks for the murmured
“I do”s.
In the pews of London’s abandoned churches
are insects eating God,
and elsewhere,
a prophet looks into her bathroom mirror
and spits out bloodied words
into the sink.
You wipe it up to write
your poetry.
The tigers, tamed as a species,
mourn the deaths
of too many children, but
the factories still bleed out their excess,
coughing sickly,
like infants—heartless and born early—
with weak lungs.