Poems from 2015
All poems written in 2015 by Mingji Liu.
What is a pier but a disappointed bridge?
2015 · Mingji Liu
she stares out at
the Slovakian mountains
in beauty
her eyes kissed
with the lightest crow’s feet
her hair, oily
chocolate ropes
she holds her mother’s whip
she swings her father’s hips.
This woman in
A half-torn shirt
Gazes out into the pinescape.
She runs from home.
What can I do?
With neither the
Long, white arms to hold
Or tall, dark beard to stroke.
She is wandering down
The graffiti alleys of
Lebanon.
The sandy shores of
Egypt.
In Jordan
She climbs a rock.
Buys her first shisha pipe.
In Jordan,
She meets a French man,
Coming down from Darwin through to Adelaide.
They agree to meet in six months time
At St Cross Station.
She drives her to Northern Victoria
Where they make love in
A motel room
In some dusty
Town in Northern Victoria.
What is a pier but
A disappointed bridge?
What are these words
But hack street words?
To be mocked
To be deciphered
And the shamed?
Maybe it is not here,
But in those mountains,
Alleyways, places
I have never been nor will never see
That this interloper
Can lie in exile?
She stares out into the alps
And it is filled
With a tender beauty.
Budapest
2015 · Mingji Liu
The Országház. House of the Nation.
A cathedral of teeth, a fortress of claws.
A half-buried ribcage, dipped in crimson, sharpened with black ink.
A redback stalking the banks of the Danube.
The Magyars once built an empire on this bleak, frost sluiced land. Surely with this great war machine, this red-and-white nightmare engine, they can reclaim their mighty kingdom.
Butterscotch
2015 · Mingji Liu
Gilded
in butter,
anointed
by cream,
this
saucepan
commands
legions of sugar,
an honour
guard of salt,
and the noble
vanilla
of conquest.
Its smooth,
gold-brown
sauces
roll
and melt
into
kingdoms of
biscuit,
pudding,
and
schnapps.
Even these
fingers,
sticky from
stirring such
sweetness,
are glazed
regal
by this
coronation
of syrup.
Canberra, after rain
2015 · Mingji Liu
Walking across campus after
the rains.
That smoky aroma of
forgotten earth.
Like opening the spice cupboard
on a slow, overcast day.
Clay
2015 · Mingji Liu
last night
I caught you
with clay-smeared lips
and chalk-dust teeth
I caught you
with a mouthful of sand
and mortar weeping
down your chin
in silent awe
I watched you
suck the marrow from the brickwork with your ragged lips
pick the limescale off the tiles with your ragged teeth
before swallowing them
one by one
like lemon drops
I wish I knew what it is like
to be so hungry
to hold an emptiness
not even stone and chalk could fill
in harvest times
we hibernated
filled our pockets with the knucklebones of old lovers
and waited for the water pipes to freeze over
and when we were together
collecting the underbrush in our mason jars
we wondered together
where all the mud
beneath our feet had gone.
Dresden
2015 · Mingji Liu
I think I shall visit Dresden again. In ten, no, twenty years time.
Perhaps by then the yawning, fallow gaps of Altstadt will have blossomed out, back into its former sandstone glory. Perhaps with time the Frauenkirche will no longer resemble the inside of a Hungarian bathhouse. Perhaps one day Neustadt will escape the clutches of its bourgeois-bohème death spiral. Perhaps.
Ah! Imagine that – Elbflorenz reborn!
How I would love to waltz down Dresden’s wide streets again. I would trace my fingers along the street art and ride the rumbling trams. I would kick through the dead leaves of Alaunpark and wander through the riverside flea market, before sailing down the Elbe itself to find out where all the pretty Saxony girls are.
Fairy-wrens
2015 · Mingji Liu
Dandenong girl
thousand stepped girl
joyweed at your breast
blown grass as you rest
Dreams
you gently
caught
in tree fern whorls
and paperbark furls
Corhanwarrabul girl
ferny creek girl
lyrebirds in your bed
swamp gum overhead
Nightdress
you calmly
stitched
with bush-pea beads
and snow gum seeds
Morning brings
a fairy-wren
Malurus cyaneus
a sudden flirt of blue
Its blue is
precious
and
for you
For a mother-to-be
2015 · Mingji Liu
Your child will be a flower small,
A blossom to be loved by all.
Perhaps a daisy, soft and bright,
A newborn of the summer light.
It will grow with earth and air,
And loving parents, kind and near.
It will bask in a bright, bright sun:
The warmth of a brand new mum.
Fragments 1-9
2015 · Mingji Liu
(1)
The Low Woods is a temperate forest located west of the Craven Sea. It stretches from the northernmost reaches of the Winewaters to the foot of the Spicer Hills.
The forest is composed of a rich array of deciduous and evergreen species such as monk pine, crow’s pine, seneschal pine, ironwood, hinterwood, wolfbeam, and blue spear.
(2)
cigarette cologne and
riverine handkerchiefs
I watch the car lights drift over Sullivans Creek
I have been here before
in another city perhaps
(3)
Every evening, gouts of blue and white smoke enshroud the enclave. It is a city-within-a-city, encircled by iron walls and awash with choking incense. It is a gleaming, blameless bethel; its bridges strung with prayer flags, its gutters gorged with chrism, its alleyways carved with eyeless shrines.
Only ten thousand worshippers are allowed within its sacred borders each day. No one is allowed to die or give birth behind its walls.
(4)
upon this chair I do recline
| floor | ceiling | walls all smelling of pine |
why
why do they write down all my lies
why are they pushing dots into my eyes
(5)
On days of mourning, they pour the ashes of their loved ones into her bubbling waters and cover her surface with flower petals. On days of joy and harvest, they bathe in her coolness and toss bright and violent dyes into her depths.
The Throne – a hard, square isle at the heart of the river – looms over them all, silently judging the soul of every single pilgrim.
(6)
i
i
i am an imperial daughter
all drenched in holy water
just take me in the garden
with no bureaucratic pardon
(7)
*Chitinous trees
*Tall, black trees. Chitinous bark and bulbous compound eyes. Covered in fine cilia. Their blowfly wings twitch and shiver when the wind picks up.
*Toothshrubs
*Thorny, waxy bushes. Pink and translucent fruits, filled with teeth and a saliva-like fluid. They are pulpy and have a mildly salty taste.
(8)
i harvested the birds upon the mount
plucking the feathers on the count
i cast them into the fire
as they screamed and
and
called me liar
(9)
At daybreak, the survivors were on the move again, leaving a mass of mud, roots, and manure in their wake. There were nearly three hundred of them, stern-skinned and tanned, driving a vanguard of donkeys, oxen, and camels across the vast and dirty grasslands. Ahead of them: a red, beating sun. Behind them: the white, silent stars.
Their animals dragged a cacophony of bleached metal shells – taxicabs, caravans, trailers, omnibuses, and motorcycles. Many were gutted, without engine or interior. All of them heaved along to the tune of buckling axels and rusting wheels. This song was all that remained of the world that had so tenderly, so soberly, so painfully given birth to them.
Fragments 10-16
2015 · Mingji Liu
(10)
tonight,
there is lightning in the skyline
as silent as the city lights
beating inside these tired sheets.
I scrape the mouth of your driveway
and my tow bar shrieks.
(11)
When I was six, the old missionary taught me how to read the symbols carved into the limestone. He would take me up to the outcrops and point out all the carvings. Those rocky hills were like wind-battered islands to me, lost in a sea of yellow tussock, humming of mystery.
See this one? He would say, running his hands over a notched and chiselled boulder. This one is Cidel. The crone star.
And this one here, the one that looks like a cracked egg? This is Greni. The formless womb.
And look up there. That one is Narin. The night sister. Do you see how it resembles moth wings?
Or how about this one? This one is Harna. The snake father. The missionary would tap the ancient carving with his walking stick. That one, he would say,* the shepherds still worship that one.
*
(12)
a cyclist
cuts through melbourne cemetery,
across a field of headstones
knocked like crooked teeth.
your helmetless hair dances
as you glide down rathdowne st.
(13)
Matteo loved watching the ships arrive at port. While his brothers played stick-swords down by the canals, or chased cats and girls in the market square, Matteo would instead run down to the harbour and witness the endless mercantile carnival – the swaggering stevedores; the rolling barrels; the creaking crates; the snapping ropes; the yelps and cries of foreign tongues.
Every day, the port would be filled with swarms of skiffs, carracks, lateen-sail dhows, clippers and iron-hulled windjammers. He watched men unload peculiar cargos. Red timber and goldwood from the Low Woods. Whale meat and charred idols from the Sevenseas. Pungent spices and scorching peppers from the Eastern Reaches. The marvels and treasures of a hundred nations.
The harbour writhed in a heady, exotic cacophony and Matteo was transfixed.
Occasionally, ambassadorial ships from far-flung, semi-mythical places like Venice and Kolkata and Tenochtitlan would arrive, to sign treaties or draft trading charters. One time he even laid eyes on a great Venetian chattel ship, silently moored at dawn, unloading dozens upon dozens of grim, tattooed slaves. Amidst the early morning sea fog, it looked like a hulk of pale leather, bobbing beside the gantry cranes.
**
(14)**
tramcars
stutter towards the concourse,
along skinny arterial lines
through knots and fists of carbon.
you are burying tulip bulbs
with bare hands in somebody’s garden.
(15)
A giant mantis, as large as a dog, sat in the centre of the table on an ornate silver platter. It was a luxurious green and golden roast, drizzled with vegetable gravy, and decorated with honeyed apples and thick beetroot slices. The guests were delighted.
The remaining hors d’oeuvres were being served. Bowls of fried slater, buttered crickets, sweet cicadas, bitter grasshoppers, and iced beetles. The night had barely started and they were already down to the last bottle of the moth brandy.
Jo picked up a slater in the palm of her hand, cracked it open like a clam and ate it with garlic relish and rosemary. On her left, Laura was sucking the succulent white flesh out of a cicada shell. ‘You should try the earwig haunch,’ she said between her chews and swallows, ‘the sauce is amazing’.
(16)
by evening,
this city’s crown is made faceless
by a thousand commuters dressed like crows
with a thousand faces buried in phones.
I drop mine on the ground,
its screen cracks and curls like ice.
on swanston st,
you toss a coin into the hat
of a young man in velvet rags
holding a guitar and a selling price.
Lying in the yellow grass, staring at the clouds. You think one of them looks like a wedding cake, but your pet dog disagrees.
2015 · Mingji Liu
windscape, 3rd edition.
you draw tropospheric cirriform.
it’s hard-edged
from Manila and
tastes of blue paint and rain
on tin roofs.
nice.
your opponent plays
cirrus fibratus radiatus.
it has a stratiform buff
which imbues it
with the sound of light
in mid-October.
cool.
luckily, you reveal
Appalachian updraft which
evolves your summon
into a high-level
cumulonimbus incus.
sweet.
its righteous single-cell
heft forces your opponent to
throw all evapotranspiration
specials
into the discard pile.
win.
the game restarts once both
players reach the
rain stage.
remember to
reshuffle the deck.
nature channel
2015 · Mingji Liu
prime time
viewing
upon this couch
of broken
stones.
a flickering
drama
of firefly
embers.
the dry branch
crackles with
hazy
adverts.
with a boot-heel
kick,
we change the
channel.
now the credits
sting my eyes
with raw
smoke.
I lift my head
and see
a thousand
lonely
stars.
this must be
what watching
the tv
at home
should feel
like.
Netball at Flagstaff
2015 · Mingji Liu
Winter rain
paints our bones.
The garden beds
ache for spring.
Yet the game
endures.
paperback
2015 · Mingji Liu
This thunderheaded morning
dribbles down the flimsy eaves
onto my clammy, crow beak shoes
as I cross the diluvian bike path and cram
into a Route 55 tin of weary sardines
heavy with the recycled breaths of
so many wet dog commuters –
the rejected cyclists,
the dejected Bourke St suits –
all dripping their thumbs on screens
that seem to shudder under this tinny pressure,
and even as I tread for air with musty, metal breaths,
and even as I stare at the defeated floor,
I am clenched by this sodden pareidolia
of seeing your trembling face in the glass drops
(or your stoplight lips in the window smears)
and so consumed am I by this sopping,
gripping, slip and slop of bodies,
like lukewarm teabags, bobbing on and off,
making sweaty infusions at Royal Park Station,
Children’s Hospital, at Haymarket,
that at this stop I am ready to
plunge myself into the storm
and curse and curse
and curse at your rainhead!
Then at Flagstaff Gardens
A man gets on
And opens a novel.
I am fixated and stunned
By how crisp and clean
The pages are.
And suddenly
I am calmed by
The simplicity of things.
Port Fairy
2015 · Mingji Liu
Wind whisked,
white,
the beach scours
our naked backs.
Cresting talons,
of salt and
shivering sapphire,
sweep the coast.
There is a
forgetting
in the way
my
sand prints
dissolve.
There is a
remembering
in the way
the sea
tastes
on the corners
of my skin.
Possible showers. Level 12.
2015 · Mingji Liu
a fever of rain,
heaven-burst and spectral.
vortices of rain,
shearing down canyons of
concrete and cranes.
this heaving engine,
catharsis.
these grey-glass walls,
chilled.
a smear, a splash of tramcars beneath.
Rangatira
2015 · Mingji Liu
I can never be defeated.
When my father is eaten, when my brothers are eaten,
When my sisters are food for beetles,
And my children are slaves,
Only I will remain.
I can never be silenced.
Strike me with your taiaha, bash me with your patu,
Pierce me with your Pākehā bullets,
And you will hear the wind whistle through my chest,
A musket hole, ragged and raw,
A hole for bleeding.
I will stand strong.
This great forest is my strength, this wild river is my strength,
This blind woman is my strength.
If I die today, the forest will keep standing.
So I will not die today.
Rome
2015 · Mingji Liu
Greasy pizza breakfast and Senegalese panini.
Open-air concert at the Spanish Steps.
Overpriced gelato at Piazza Navona.
I tread these slick and lazy New Year streets.
For you, I toss two coins into Trevi Fountain.
It is good to be alone sometimes, my friend.
silver skink reserve
2015 · Mingji Liu
the mayflies are suspended above the darkling grass like sycamore seeds in botanical vials.
gingerly, I hike (stumble?) in this lonesome jacket through the damp heavy, pastoral fields of urban yellow grass
to find my spot. I light a match. It’s a hiss, a flare to signal my descretation of the Body Temple.
the clarion hiss of Barbarians on the steppes.
Why do I come here? Is it to find this secret place of peace? (A lie)
the drone of the medical research building far away is snores and mores and tired howls.
the sky is pinkscale wallpaper, it is a murder of red
and purple, garish like the vulva of oyster.
Hush hush. My mind is wandering. This tobacco calms me. (Damnable lies!)
taking the match to my pipe, I make a charring light. And squat on this shit-stained rock,
this twisted, moulting branch in the silver skink reserve,
the skinks are all asleep. And I am smoking my pipe. Watching this violent sunset murder.
mayflies suspended like sycamore seeds in a vial.
the sunset murder mimics the fire of my pipe.
I come here because there is a sigil on the nape of my neck which fears that the pretty girls from across the street
are judging my out-of-vogue habit.
Therapy of the soul! Squatting on this shit-stained rock! Camphor hurrah!
only there are no more pretty girls in this part of town.
they all moved south of the river with their boys and their pristine lungs.
only the mayflies and the long grass and the smoke from my briar pipe.
This Brunswick house
2015 · Mingji Liu
This old Brunswick house:
Half-swept,
Half-bones,
Groans in courtly,
Nightly,
Pale display.
A light,
Transgressively so,
Curdles its doeskin walls,
Its dusted floors,
With pallid and imperial
Invitation.
Winter arrives,
As it always does,
Wool-breathed and horned,
Star-creamed and dawned,
Its raw knots unfurled
Into puffs of silver,
Into cups of bitter skin.
Yet those were the nights when we
Held close our starry marriage
Inside this hollowed out
Half-way home.
Then came spring,
That sweet-smelling canton of petals.
Bristled,
Pinecone green,
Its red buds yearning
From the cracks in our stone steps.
Bursting,
Yellow-gold and gilded,
A libation of grass seeds and summer dust
Pouring into our eyes,
Our lungs,
Our lust.
Those were the days when we
Spoke of leaving this wisping,
Curtained place.
But we never did.
Or rather,
We never could.
This old Brunswick house:
Yours and mine,
Half-formed,
Half-swept,
Half-found.
tonight, there is lightning
2015 · Mingji Liu
tonight,
there is lightning in the skyline
as silent as the city lights
beating inside these tired sheets
I scrape the mouth of your driveway
and my tow bar shrieks
a cyclist
cuts through melbourne cemetery
through a forest of headstones
raked like rows of crooked teeth
your helmetless hair dances
as you glide down rathdowne st
tramcars
stutter towards the concourse
churn along skinny arterial lines
through knots and fists of carbon
you are burying tulip bulbs
with bare hands in someone’s garden
by evening,
the crown of this city is made faceless
by a thousand commuters dressed like crows
with a thousand faces buried in phones
I drop mine on the ground
and the screen cracks and curls like ice
up down in Fitzroy,
you are tossing coins into the hat
of some young man in velvet rags
holding a spanish guitar and a selling price
Venice
2015 · Mingji Liu
Nightfall in Venezia. One must depart the narrow street-squeeze of San Marco and San Polo and escape sideways into the depths of this city. Weaving through the empty canals and corridors of Cannaregio and Castello, one becomes a wanderer among the dim-lit walkways and dead-end bridges, among the snoring sound of boat-creak and lap-lapping of stone steps.
Up ahead, a little square surrounded by the shutters of old shops. They have not yet taken down the Christmas decorations. The street lamps cast a mulled and swollen haze of orange over this place. Two children play soccer against a brick wall.
Have I found the real Venice? Or is this just another trick of the light?