The 25th Letter
with your yellowish skin
you enjoy meditating within the shape of
a wishbone, inside the broken wing
of an oriental bird strayed, or
in a larger sense, you look like
the surfacing tail of a pacific whale
who yells low, but whose voice reaches afar
far beyond a whole continent, to a remote village
near the yellow river, where you used to sunbathe
rice stems, reed leaves, cotton skeletons
with a fork made of a single horn-shaped twig
when you were a barefooted country boy
on the other side of this new world
is this why you are so obsessed
with the horn-like letter?
Yuan Changming, 8-time Pushcart nominee and author of 5 chapbooks (including Kinship [2015] and The Origin of Letters [2015]), began to learn English at 19 and published monographs on translation before moving to Canada. Currently editing Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver, Changming has since mid-2005 had poetry appearing in 1059 literary publications across 36 countries, including Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Cincinnati Review and Threepenny Review.