Two poems by Yuan Changming

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?

Siamese Stanzas: Snowfall

 

 

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.