yes, yes, 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 the reason for your obsession
with the letter?

—

Changming Yuan, 4-time Pushcart nominee and author of Allen Qing Yuan, holds a PhD in English, teaches privately and edits Poetry Pacific in Vancouver. Yuan’s poetry appears in 639 literary publications across 25 countries, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry (2009, 2012), BestNewPoemsOnline, Exquisite Corpse and London Magazine. Poetry submissions welcome at yuans@shaw.ca.