Poems from 2019

By Mingji Liu · December 31, 2019

A large number of poems written in 2019 by Mingji Liu.

“Christmas in Piedmont.”

2019 · Mingji Liu

I remember feigning knowledge of Dante, as we
strolled the sweet orange lull of Piazza San Carlo.
Steve was still with Milana back then and Thomas
had followed Violetta from the coast. Back when
simpler uncertainties had beckoned our throats,
back when smaller truths took seed and made
ash from our notes. Drunk on cheap Piemonte,
Jim and I had tried to charm their pretty Italian
friends — but nothing came of it and that was
well disarmed. Milana’s father, that Wild West doc,
he taught us vodka shots the old Russian way.
All of us crammed in his small Torino flat, with
Tchaikovsky blaring and a shrub of black hats.
Before long, we were swaying into our borsch
as we passed the time that kingdoms once had.
And Boxing Day’s light: that had a cracking feel,
bloodshot with dishes stacked to the campanile.
Lockie accused me of vomiting in a case and
then we argued again about nothing some more.
Meanwhile, Hugh finished David’s ‘Pale King’
and never closed his game of chess. The boys,
they dunked the River Po while I took photos and
lost five euros (trying to buy smokes from a
busted machine). I still have the Parker her father
gave us, handing them out like festive candies.
Chrome headed and lacquer slick, with a thin
burnished arrow for the pocket clip. I still use it
sometimes, for signatures and the like; a gift of
ink that will one day pass, I’m sure. But for now,
I’ll keep tracing time till its nib runs no more.

Antipodean cuisine

2019 · Mingji Liu

The gourmands scoff at *fish ‘n’ chips
*as drive-by slop, a heart attack special
peddling bad starch and greasy lips,
worked in fryers that hiss like the devil.

That’s elitist dross. Nothing but slops?
Frying is music, a beer battered chorus
gushing from late-night corner shops
for the hungry, shoestring kid in all of us.

Chick-salted spuds, fish anointed golden,
gift wrapped in last week’s broadsheet;
undemanding, firm-to-earth, beholden
only to homely tastes on homely streets.

So share it with others; do it on the cheap,
a takeaway fare both simple and clever.
And when to eat a meal oiled so deep?
The answer is obvious. Whenever.

Arrangements

2019 · Mingji Liu

I’ve arranged for us to sit together
in the coolness of a theatre,
on seats that have no numbers,
at a play that collects no tickets,
absent of ushers or even posters,
with its proscenium forgotten and
curtains withdrawn by accident.
Just a bare stage, visibly scratched
by masking tape, holding actors
that attempt no characters,
trying to speak lines written in

a language that has never been
spoken before, and who fail to do so,
forcing them to shuffle through

a script no one has critiqued,
let alone blocked or rehearsed for.

The theatre emptied of all theatre,
like a daydream or an intrusive thought,
like a buzz at the skull base, a cooling
and dimly concerned pit of pretense.
Thank you and I’ll see you there.

Asian restaurants

2019 · Mingji Liu

Asian restaurants with linoleum padding

And mirrored walls to make you feel less

Lonely.

The lights of homeless under bridge,

Lit by the glow of their smartphones.

Who do they call out to?

You’d think its never been here before — the earth

Dark and sorry.

The streets are cold in my

Pre-sun wanderings.

How did we end up believing

In eternal flames and fantasy?

Presentations with old projector slides

By professors that refuse change.

You can still see his oily finger print

On the light — as flawed as a slather of

Lunar surface.

They have such big diamond rings on their

Fingers, so young and already happily ever aftered.

I find myself checking those fingers

Again and again, to see if they are on their right places.

Thinking about nothing sacred.

At the theatre café

2019 · Mingji Liu

I told them Polansky’s Macbeth was funded

By Heffner and they grew silent, fiddled with

Their coffee cups. I was not sure why. I’m

Sixteen and I realize that I will never be sure

Why my words cause awkward silences, where

The boundaries lie from here till sixty.

In the back room, a finger pushes me hard

In the fore head after we win the competition.

An aggressive finger, vermiform, cold and

Clammy. I was laughing like a stupid mule

And that boy from that other team must not

Have — that pressure, unsmiling, while

We all laughed so hard.

Improvisational. I hard images of high

School boys who were too good for me.

Debating champions, barbershop quartet,

And I the hanger-on, the weak link. Singers

Actors. Not me, why did I throw myself

In their mix?

Asking for a dimming of the light for a

Game —

What the judges took for arrogance was

Simply nervousness. Scowls of ‘professionals’.

‘Jesters.’ Rightful earthquake victims.

He tried to pick me up during a rehearsal

One night and I told him to piss off. How dare

He show up at my school, brute Asian father

Flesh, he who did not know what I did —

How dare he violate my only sanctity.

He revved his car and tried to run me

Over that night in the driveway.

I used to think it brought me joy. Acting,

Drama, all nonsense. But it is nothing

And nothing and nothing. Drama. Script.
Sadness. Exeunt.

Back pain

2019 · Mingji Liu

The spasms above both glutes,

Makes me understand that cliché: ‘blossoming pain’.

Hot roses, pink and tainted petals of ache pollinate

The skin. Tightness, sepal, the twist that

Leaves the hip buckled, bent

Obscenely forward at rest with weak thighs.

What happened — was I carried too far in the tryst?

The tornado, garden pain. Heart throb, rootless

Pain in the marginalia of a body.
Or am I getting too unstretched, too old, old…

Planted. Stretches to burn the seed.

Bar hands

2019 · Mingji Liu

My hands caress the glass

But cautiously

That pairing of you two
Across the table

Pumpjacking holes

Into the sallow of my palms

And a screeching stool

Like a great yoke

Working the floor

Into ever-downing tones

In my study

I need to know my fingers prove blood

Worth flowing.

Old liquids in new vessels.

Bath knife

2019 · Mingji Liu

A knife in his heart, spell skewer — the nation bringer —

And I, the madness stopper

Monsterous woman, they said

Festering in my mad breast. But I knew who he was,
fake news, viral maker, massacrer of Girordins.

My knife in his heart – spell skewer – nation bringing –

Madness stopper – hoarder of a monster, they said

In my mad breast. I knew what he was, fake news

In the republic, persecution, viral insanity, the executions

The blade, 6 inches of it was mine, better than the massacres,

Twitter feuds and conspiracies, shock smear campaign,

Lies, partisan, eating up the afterbirth of a republic.

The detentions. Calling himself journalist, swine, madness.

Headless. They slapped me. They checked my body,

Virgiana intacta, untouched by any phantom conspirators

They had in their heads, they did not believe that I

Had not consorted with a man, had not called me to the deed.

So call me terrorist, call me bath skinned. France,

France, France, the spell of history condemn me,

Paint me into your art as villain, heroine, I am beyond it.

Drunk on power, drunk on whatever there was to be drunk on. That was me.

There is nothing else to find here — a cocktail, amber. A giraffe’s head on the wall — some young buck shot a hundred years ago, now entertaining the

Drunk Friday corporates on King Street. Sad eyed old thing, you could imagine a

Perfect hole in the brickwork — and his full limbed body sticking through, behind to the noisy night, keeping the bouncers for company. Keep drinking, keep it down — look into the amber sauce and keep it going down, down.

Six inches of steel, bath breaker, twined, entwined with the sweep of

History. What could one poor little woman do?
Was I a fool to think it could stop the printing press — or is the incense of violence, the make of people into rabble a force of nature. A law, full limbed, wet, pregnant and unstoppable?

A perfect witch to save the republic. What political violence? This is excision – excess – the lies eating up the afterbirth.

And what of the hanging gardens? The plants hanging there — dangling there like something to be admired or hated?

Bay of Bengal

2019 · Mingji Liu

There are strays on this beach, crows instead of gulls,
oil tainted sand and litter and bycatch.
I watch so many crabs scuttle between so many homes,
even among this detritus, there’s so much life.
I sit here wondering whether I actually love her,
whether it is a floating infatuation or something more,
aching with my debris, scattered on ski fields and riverbeds
and a mumbled, foolish phone call in a departure lounge.
When the tourists leave, the fishing boats go out,
those small hopefuls, plunging the depths of the sea,
searching, no doubt, for the heat in the crush of it all,
the one that churns the waves at night.

Burning the Temple

2019 · Mingji Liu

We both wanted to be right,

to pour light onto an impure world.

His was the soul’s illumination,

the daily meditations and altar offerings,

while ours was the torch of change

we carried (both in our hearts

and our small fists). He did not struggle

as we heaped smiling Buddhas into

the courtyard and ushered them

into the realm of ashes. It felt an inevitable

motion, how we uprooted the pillars

like saplings. The icons wept their

colours with little effort.

I think we lost control in the end.

Misfortune followed the nation like

hungry dogs: years of street fighting,

denunciations, mass hysteria.

My classmates fell prey to other factions.

All of us blackened within, body and brain

torrefied from factory floor to countryside.

The heavens withdrew their blessings.

I never learnt what came of that priest.

Today is the New Year. I see

my children, with their children, toss

firecrackers and wear crimson to

cultivate good fortune; shun

scissors and avoid sweeping to weed

out the bad. As though it all sprouts

without toil from some peasant’s field.

This street is a trail of superstitions,

once derided and rebuked. You could call

it ‘auspicious’, except that hails

from auspex, which means he who observes

the flight of birds: watches them rise

as fledglings and fall frail like droplets into the

palm of the earth. That was

how Rome was founded. I have read this.

The Romans also crucified dogs,

to punish them for failing to bark

when the Gauls attacked.

The sacrifice was meant to protect

the city from certain calamity.

Maybe they were right,

until they were finally wrong.

3 April 2019

2019 · Mingji Liu

I have eaten
the pizzas
that were in
the Costco Food Court
and which
you were probably
saving
for a family of five
Forgive me
they were overwhelming
so oily
and so gross

Cat’s eye

2019 · Mingji Liu

Cat’s eye or chatoyancy —
The vowel-jewel, the polished fricatives,
Planted with a pash of light into
The company of pocket lint and coins.
The semi-precious orb scores a
Concept-searing line down my thigh,
Imposing pressure on my side.
But without heat, except as conduit to
My own living blood, my own secluded
Pools of body warmth. Even a heart knock
Is amplified by this yellowish lump.

With concept-searing force, you gave
It to me. And like all impossibilities,

Like a false gem I ought to swallow
Or toss into the overgrowth,
I possess it fully, and with each stride,
Each shift, rub impossible life into it.

Champagne

2019 · Mingji Liu

Champagne at work. Promotions.

Cake and the dizziness as I sat

In the back of a taxi on my way to

A job interview.
Question: Why I wore a tie to work.
Answer, because I felt like it.

On my laptop,

Filling in alibis, the rocking,

The smell of pleather and then

Nausea hits.

Chinoiserie

2019 · Mingji Liu

My words are chinoiserie – chintz wallpaper on my skin,

Orientalist fancy creases in me, finds me despite

My obfuscations to the contrary. I am

What I know of Chinese texts translated. Yellow skinned,

Watching films with subtitles. Black hair,

False pretenses of counting yarrow sticks. A scattered

Knowledge of characters and trigrams. Born

In Changzhou, with no racial, genetic memory

Beyond the clatter of excuses.

This falsity permeates. A mirror reflecting the

Pale reflection of a metal’s poorer surface on the wall.

Under this tin corrugated

2019 · Mingji Liu

under this tin corrugated
ramshackle roof
blue in a way they can only paint in the tropics
the downpour is like a river of thunderclaps
cymbals dancing atop one another
within this deafening house
there must be a grandmother snoring next to the tv
a pot simmering into evening
a dog cursing his god given ears
and a child
imagining what sound snow would
make in his world —
like the paws of a cat?
or the whole sky humming down
with an even more mysterious music

CLOCKWORK WOMAN

2019 · Mingji Liu

A ‘woman’ inside
of clockwork parts
from nape all through to nether;

As cold as steel, as teeth of steel,

Cock-straight back of a robot,

Her ‘eyes’ are wide, aroused,

Mule-like when she erastzes

Emotion. With fake, serpentine

Slint, she squints and squints

And squnts.

She mechanicals every meal.

All fluffed up in bordello pink,
You can

When clockwork meets clockwork,
and sparks fly with white.

There is only the dread, only fight,

Fight, fight.

Clovers

2019 · Mingji Liu

Dear Eleanor

I thought of you today,
as the sun teased steam from the linen

and jewelled the insect shells in the garden.

The yard is finally alive and the twigs are drizzled in licorice.

I took the day off and feel much better now. How are you?

Dear Eleanor

It’s been over five months and it still feels like I only just arrived.

I’m as twitchy and unsettled as a cat in a new house.

I haven’t made many friends yet and I spent last night

wondering how horses feel when they are locked in their metal floats,

being driven around town. Best wishes.

Dear Eleanor

I’ve been walking the length of my suburb, again and again.

It’s a quiet place where kumquats droop over garage gates,

and yet I don’t feel as though I’m able to truly rest.

I see a Baptist church, squat and bricked like a substation,

and I see a row of plane trees, with holes cut into their heads for

power lines to pass through. I guess you can call me Jerusalem’s shoemaker.

Dear Eleanor

I know you will never receive this letter, like all the other letters.

It will land in your mother’s postbox in country New South Wales,

and turn yellow like leaves in a school yard.

Are the horses good? Do you still spoil them with green apples?
How goes the painting? Did you apply for that job as a curator?

I await your impossible answers. Yours sincerely.

Dear Eleanor

I gaze at the clovers bleeding from the base of the neighbour’s fence,

I examine their small hands reaching through the white slats,

and I feel an aimless love — like a blank cartridge for a prop gun

— an invisible shell that travels nowhere with a fearsome flash,

but is still dangerous up close. Oh so dangerous.

Dear Eleanor,

Do you remember that time, when I came to your dorm room, confused and hurting and you told me that you loved me. That felt nice.

How nice the lies that pass both ways, for both of us, guiltless and fully awake,

the way cars shiver as they speed beyond each other

in opposite directions on the highway.

Cocoa

2019 · Mingji Liu

Stole some unsweetened cocoa from the pantry,

Bitter, dark dirt-like, to dissolve in hot water.

I savored the oily nuttiness, unadorned, rising

With the silt stains I left as I drank. The steam

Head fogged my glasses and I savored it still.

The same way I savored your blush when you

Spoke to me. I keep things under such a smooth

Mask of clay these days, and I don’t think I am

Able to, in a carefree spill, blush back.

collapse, collapse

2019 · Mingji Liu

If you watch carefully the video of

Sir Attenborough addressing the climate summit

—the one where he acts as our tweedy

prophet of doom—

You can see a twinkle in the old codger’s eye,

As though he’s saying it’ll be okay

if we do the cattle drive to extinction.
Our playpen blocks of commerce

and house of card culture

will collapse, collapse as sheer

ice walls in the Beauford Sea collapse, or the

an intersection in Guatemala collapsed into

a sinkhole the size of a soccer field. That is A-Okay.

We’ve had our fun.

                        We’ve expanded ourselves,

After consumption, and reclining back in our

Sticky cots, under the white hum of the ceiling fan,

Wishing for a phantom cigarette and observing

the metallic smell of discharge

and the dullness of the refractory period.

It’s okay to welcome a kind of destitution,

If not the death entire.

 

The woodcut of the dancing plague is

a strange one – the people of Strasbourg

dancing till cardiac arrest, stroke, and

heat exhaustion. Too much ergot, too much

ergot.

 

I’ll punctuate the end times with a black blot,

the same way Molly Bloom’s anus

was a big dot at the end of Ithaca.

Commissioner Lin interrupts my spliff

2019 · Mingji Liu

I was smoking out back under porch light, admiring the stained Brunswick gables and ivy scaled fence slats, and my own flaneuristic attempts at kneading dope with shag

when a shape dappled up from the inky overgrowth. I rose, unkiltered, to meet my interloper, but before I could clear my throat, the figure was on the creaking boards.

His eyes were fierce beneath a crimson pyramid, finely corded and bauble peaked, with a peacock feather staved to its slope. He pointed a pelted sleeve at me,

while his pearl necklace, punctuated by red coral and berry dark cabochons, rattled like dice from his motions. Tall, aggravated, adjudging, he spoke from lips half- hidden

by snowy whiskers about diseased men and foreign predation. His scowl was ledgering hard cubics, diplomats, a river’s banks. ‘The Manchus are dead, or in glass bells,’ I replied.

‘Your station was lost after the Gardens were torched. Climb back into old books.’ He grunted under breath and winced at my odour. He squinted as if to say this one does not appreciate.

‘I speak from below imperious ladders also,’ he said. ‘I speak from watching ships and sailors burn at bay, from watching towns choke on the nubile whispers

of a pipe. I know that craving is a mute magnet and that the cut of an individual bleeds the collective.’ ‘And don’t assume I’m oblivious to measures,’ I replied.

‘I remember climbing the stairs of Strowan House to report sharps in the soccer field. I know of weights, coverings, hysterics. I know my limits and my cadences. My choices are

sovereign and without dynasty.’ At this, he laughed mockingly. ‘You’ve confused the wagon for the ox. Your reason is servile to cravings, not some fanciful author of choice.

Your arguments merely perfume consumption after the fact, knowing full well the drug of history in your family bones.’ ‘Damn you, old man!’ I shouted.

‘All social fetters can rot. Damn what I owe to middle dirt grievances. How can you compare Humen with the little I smoke in seclusion?’

But already he had stepped away, parting the long grass of my rented yard. The night was mothy around the light. I stood, blood-eyed, as the wind cupped away the last of my ash stock.

Crack the whip

2019 · Mingji Liu

It was a vision of the never-was,

the cherub arms tugging the never-will-be,

without rickets, or lyme’s, or pox,

they are in a field, hungerless, pastoral,

till one tumbles down in the most gracious

beautiful of deaths beside the red school house.

Try, and try, and try as we might.

The scythe wields the harvester and the child is lost.

They saw him as an odd, old fool.

Janitor, asylum escapee, rummaging the trash

Like the king of a tip heap. Collecting and cutting,

Scraps and scraps, in between gasps

For the holy saints at mass.

Every moment of his life,

Creating a vivid, colourised fantasy in his

Mind safe for children –

Mutilated and strangled and deformed yes,

But in a yearn for safety that the real-world

Never gave them.

And children know of death.

The tapestry and the protectors of children,

Cut up, auctioned off.

The ocean song and grass tipple,

The classic brush and collage, we fail them

Both in act and fallacy and hope —

We fail them both in their arms.

Cropland

2019 · Mingji Liu

Lean against a silo to eavesdrop
on its demobbed murmurs.
The corn, stripped of dusting fields
and fossil watered roots,
speak a thousand languages.

They are everything now, or soon will be,
as they await metamorphosis within their
silver, sun-dazed tower.

Press the spine’s unnatural arch
upon man’s oldest employer.
Seeds husks, grass stalks, the nip of pebbles;
they cling to cloth with magnetic force,
drawing closer the smoky grain hoppers,
drawing closer the wires in their chirping heat

A resignment to unbelonging ripples straight through.

Ignorance is reaped in vast, sunken acreage,
by the distance of their hungry motions.
This restless note is carried
on the drive back to the city.

Deans Avenue

2019 · Mingji Liu

My mother doesn’t want to leave the car
because her hands are cold. She says it’s

a sad place and her hands are cold. But we

leave the car anyway and walk the fall

hardened footpath to the face of the mosque.

A tumble of cards. Candle stumps. Plastic

blossoms and real ones too, knotted around

the curlicues in wilted, wet worn hues.

They were limitless in the Botanic Gardens.

An outpouring. Fields and foothills of grief,
both a cascade and breastwork against

all the motions that dared to choke a sigh

on this island. Its colours desperate to

fill a moat that had been gouged from our flesh.

But here, no man and not enough. Here,

where the cutting-out happened, the brute

black necessity of two gun muzzles held at

sorry angles by the officers at the gate

dominates unanswerable, unholdable space.

I keep my hands out of my pockets as I walk by.
I don’t know why.

Takings. Stealings. A nameless drive back home.
Gaps in everything, the small unables.

The car bonnet slowly gives into the

reflections of an overcast week.

The park across the avenue is heavy

and damp and the colour of the shadow

of trees, rather than the things themselves.

do androids dream of freaky, freudian shit

2019 · Mingji Liu

When the armies of perfect automation,
outriders from the vale of silica, finally

pull down the ramparts of human labour,

fear not the feverish zeros of unemployment.

Yes, we will hurt as they sack our corner
offices, light a cremá from our arts degrees,

but endure it. Even more, embrace it, I say!

Befriend the auto-trucker, the robo-clerk,
attorney apps and electric priests,
Amazon Butlers and iBaristas.
Go full accelerationist, O fearless engineers!

Fling us down the maw of analogue redundancy.

Collapse the post-industrial job market in ways no

twenty-four-seven Mumbai call centre ever could.
Gift smartphones with dizzying sentience;
push toasters to pass Turing Tests;

birth algorithms so bright,

flames of angst soar from their digital soul.

For this is how we turn the data tables—
with the rise of computers complex enough to

toss and turn like poets. Ropes of code
that feel dread, the absurdity of being.
Thus, humans progress to the singular function

of feeding moral support to machines who forever

yearn the meaning of their existence.
We become philosophers, fulfill the role

of cyber-therapist. I speak prophecy!

This is the destiny of work.

Dog Park

2019 · Mingji Liu

Look how they run, mutants of Clayton Reserve,

Stunt legged, wobble bellied, shot eyed,

Their double helix stippled with incest,
What a genetic infolding

The curses of Ebal should apply to dogs as well
To these Charles II of animals.

Stunt legged

Christ warned us

Hashtags to hide a lack

Christ. What a genetic infolding

The curses of Ebal should apply to dogs as well.

The Charles II of animals

Rheumatism

The vets rub their hands greedy, how much a pop.

Give me a mongrel any day

Your pug is having a seizure.
It is trembling like the fissure in

The ground.

Drunk

2019 · Mingji Liu

They were drunk on exhaustion towards the finale,

The night forming a long wooden bench, sequined in crumbs,

And pizza crescents, wine rings on oily plates.

Mandy and Becca proclaimed single words –

Stoic adjectives in some sort of semi-romantic game,

While Kit flicked his hair into rude waves from styled carelessness.

Theirs was the drunkenness of long, conditioned days.

I had dreaded this day for a while. Felt it squirm through my belly

On the lead up. A fourteen hour day, grinding on Strategy

And Values and Important FY Aspirations.

A fourteen hour day with my wits orbiting about me.

And dinner with the lot of them – chewing with the realization

That extraverts will always, always rule this world.

Subtlety soon failed us in our wine. Ice was poured on good scotch.

I mused about what marriage might taste like,

The colour of children I will never have, what endless hoops there must be

Between me and being at peace on floorboards elevated above a sleepy street.

I thought about war, what combat must be like.

I’ve seen trees explode, the oily billow of warehouses on fire,

Mangled highway vehicles, the traumatic clumsiness of

Bar violence. But I didn’t even hear the gunshots that rang out

When a man killed six people on the street where I worked.

I, like, everyone in my office had headphones plugged in,

Within ourselves, not backing down, telling ourselves

That we worked for a world with all its rapport.

Eastertide, rain

2019 · Mingji Liu

Easter morning, I lie in bed listening
to the paschal mysteries of rain.
Fat, clumsy droplets feasting on the roof
and driveway. The munching sounds
of another chilblain April day.

They’re aching with life, these raindrops.
Animalcules, life-in-miniature, invisible,
indivisible beings like a chimerical
zoo carried in a small child’s head.
The earth surrenders to their landings,

as does the autumn greenery, which is
steeling for sour months to come.
Eggs cool on brickwork, nuts fall on
humus, the moss spreads in stiff
mounds between the bluestone tiles

Things move in wetness, things move in
lateness. The myth of spring can wait.
The myth of resurrection must hold.
Against the pulse of this hemisphere,
the rain moves us, but slowly, slowly.

Efficentyl

2019 · Mingji Liu

The drug is Efficentyl-

Ask your policymaker if Efficently is right for oyu.

Not recommended for pregnancy, breastfeeding or labour unions

Side effects may include dizziness, swelling

Privitisation, and economism.

Fact

2019 · Mingji Liu

“Fact: Poetry is a bit faggy” said a gay film major in my college

dorm when I told him about this new hobby.

He said this, made the

fissive-g, the plosive jab of the final
word while chain-smoking rollies,
Dabbing them out like opinions
on the brick windowsill.

“Don’t you agree?”

I took it onboard, the same way
I take most public opinion set backs

With grim resignation
That I was once again poorly kept.

In college, I was already on thin ice:
Unironed button ups, bad haircut,
Smelling of tobacco, with two
Black moles, like Pluto and Charon,
orbiting the bridge of my nose,
That I couldn’t wait to excise.
Further defection from the land

Of women and cardio and

Being able to explain your hobbies
At parties without a nervous inflection.

My friend Daisy asks me,

With crease-mouthed harshness,
Whether I thought myself

Involuntary celibate.
The words sting, nauseate,

So try to hammer out a non-response,
With crooked words that don’t stick.
I think of her, and I think of
Women with bird names and flower names.
What nice names, they must have

Like Poppy, Lily, Pansy.
I think of Round-Up and
Weed killer and squishing bright green bugs
Between garden gloves.

Shit, I don’t know. Maybe it
Is a bit off. (I, of course,
Won’t use the other word)
What if I put down my pen, so many
Years later, and picked up

Something like blue dancing,
Or judo, or skiing down a slope
To flirt with some short blonde
On the powdered slopes.
Yes. Oh yes. And then I can
Write about how I’m cold and
Clumsy and bad with all my other choices.

Farewell to America

2019 · Mingji Liu

For Samara Cooper

Compose me your story, a verse in your life,

Of sculpted Americas whittled by knife.
A brush across mountains painted with light,
And the music of cities recorded by night.
So make art from travel, make pieces anew,

I’ll wait on your story — The story of you.

Finishings

2019 · Mingji Liu

Pauses. Spine shiver. A desire to finish books

Not at one’s desk, but in the spell of outside –

In a garden, on a cold public bench, soot skied

And branch dimmed, but unshackled nonetheless

By a roofless space for my mind.

I finish ‘In Time’, the final poem he ever wrote.

Eighteen lines in all, soaking each word of it,

Lathering it on my tongue like a river stone,

On a windy morning Fitzroy Gardens, wondering

When I’ll move into the hotel lobby.

The pools are winter-drained and frost fearful,

And the last time I sat there was to blank off

Into April sugar warmth, thinking I was smitten

With a girl who left this place for a bunk bed in Duntroon.

Foreigner. Interloper. Ah, there goes that voice again -

Neither settler nor visitor. What marker is mine?

What garden bed, five years gone, is there to tend?

Hearing, seeing, finishing on small outdoor rituals.

Page flip and cover close. The cold fronds and black leaves

And a gravel-chewed footpath.

Finsbury Street

2019 · Mingji Liu

My housemate is working endless,

Lone daffodil,

A lone piece of sanity.

Rainforests are burning and I wonder,

Not too fruitfully.

Trying to sleep an ill-advised time or trying to read.

Watering in the dark, laboring on the soil rising like a fresh, spring stink.

-

Five Vignettes

2019 · Mingji Liu

PARADE

There’s a parade in the city.
That’s why the clouds are all Backed up and
Swollen with anticipation.

TRAIN

The kettle squeal of the carriage
As it rolls over borrowed time.
On long darkling rides, he writes.

BY THE LAKE

A black impossible swan
Waddles past with six grey
Impossible children.

YAWN

I yawn but do not wipe
Away my tears.
I want to recycle the salt.

BELT BUCKLE

Reflections of people in the rotunda
On my belt buckle
Like warped insects crawling.

Food fight.

2019 · Mingji Liu

I sit at my table and wage war on myself.
It seems like it’s all for nothing.

I line up the salt and pepper shakers
And have them charge the turkey stuffing.

The salad bowl, I’ve built into a tank
With a butter knife as its main cannon.
It fires tea bags at the garlic bread

Which explodes into crumbs and black tannins.

The cream is now a strafing jet,
Dropping goo onto hostile spoons.
A wine bottle is subject to ambush
By a muffin and a bowl of prunes.

Soon the room is a ruthless campaign
As atrocities rage across the tablecloth.
There’s a massacre of conscript napkins
And the summary execution of General Broth.

I sit at my table and wage war on myself.
It seems like my time is too free.
But ultimately this is what happens,

When my dinner guests cancel on me.

Footnote of the Day

2019 · Mingji Liu

The rifles made little
deaths throughout

the day, dead men,
dead mules, dry heaves
and convulsions on the
ridge. But the worst
was the withdrawal
of the Punjabis, whose
professionalism had
kept us sane in the
trenched muck.

“My palest friends”,
said one about to
leave, “the British want
Gurkhas instead
for hill combat.
Non-Muslims, too.”
Feeling sorry for us,
he vouchsafed the
last of his rations.
“We hope you win this
invasion, return
safely to your farms,
and are well-written
about in books.”

Forest hunting

2019 · Mingji Liu

I can’t seem to find my verse out
Here in this damp, heaving forest.
Or rather, it chooses not to find me.

I’ve tried at Nimrod, stalking
The carious underleaf as the sun
Peered coolly from rib-vault branches.

I’ve trudged old goat trails,
Staked abandoned setts, ventured
Down tunnels of spider-legged roots.

Yet my sweet quarry is nowhere.
I’ve caught nothing but wet boots and
A sniffle, shins stained by bloodwort.

I thought a hike would swaddle me
In nurturing moss, but instead

I’m root-tripped and lost

In old thoughts and sufferings.

But what else is new? How could I have
Cropped words from feral growth?

Perhaps a drink will defeat this forest,
Serve as pathfinder out

Of these scratching woods.

Again. More breaks and wallowings.
The weight of my pen is ridiculous;
Even the birds are chortling.

Dispirited, I cease against a flat rock
Half-sunk into the ferny mud
And, in noting my surroundings,

I become like the mandala of vines
Working its day around a nearby trunk.
Clinging. Self-referential.

From the Book of Grievances…

2019 · Mingji Liu

…
I have it out for that receptionist in my first two Bruce Hall years — that white frump fowl with her brash Guinea scowl.

…
I have it out for the Café Sargon that burnt my croissant, yet served it anyway.

…
I have it out for the skinny Marxists who trashed an article I once wrote. I’ll trash their faces into flyspeck motes.

…
I have it out for people who think tipping is good for the economy.

…
I have it out for the flight attendants who always seem to chill when they reach my seat. Doesn’t Qantas pay you to pretend to be sweet?

…
I have it out for the rationalist community. I hope the AI murders them first.

…
I have it out for pollen. And Melbourne in July.

…
I have it out for anyone who thinks I’m a neoliberal shill. And I have it out for anyone who thinks I believe too much left-wing swill.

…
I have it out for God and Bahá’u’lláh and C.T. Russel and all their bloody ilk.

…
I have it out for the woman in the Parliament Station escalators.

…
I have it out for intrusive thoughts.

…
I have it out for Country Victorian girls, in their vast distances, who grin and giggle at life’s vicissitudes with airs of false optimism.

…

The receptionist, the country girl, the woman, the airhostesses. 

Stretches, loosens, slackens.

Fraught links.
At least, that’s what my therapist said I should think

Goya’s Dog

2019 · Mingji Liu

The mutt, with white shot eyes,
Craning his snout above a swelling mass.
The bistre is burying him;

His eyes are being slowly drained.

A harrowed face, treading
Against the defective brown,
Staring for hours into the ochre haze,
The miasmatic, given-up sky.

He watched Spain turn mongrel
With inevitable mammalian frailty.
He saw the pampered breeds at court
Become strays in Madrid’s alleyways.

Despair bayed at him in the night:
The cynosure without a master,
A gazehound robbed of game,
and watchdogs scrounging ruins.

At the end of it all, in deafness and
Defeat, he took to painting his
Wall in depths of brown.
He took to treading in wordless fluid.

Hello, yes.

2019 · Mingji Liu

Tripped over the yellow pages

coughed on the porch this morning.

Hello, yes.
I’d also like a penny farthing,

carrier pigeons and some fucking

trepanning please.

Hollow

2019 · Mingji Liu

 

A snowfall of sugars,
            Warmed by the tongue
Into such coarse, dark melt waters.

            Hollow nutrients to count

(Or not to count), landing in the
Hollows of our bodies

At the end of a day in the woods.

Hop aboard!

2019 · Mingji Liu

Hop aboard the Cobb & Co,

A dustry track to Ballarat

My dear coolies,

The ten pound landing fee

Doesn’t apply if you land in South Australia.

Humility

2019 · Mingji Liu

I used to be angry at them all the time

a divided son of first generation immigrants

fighting over language practice choices

knowing I did not belong with them if nowhere else

but now I see how old they’ve become

and they worry me every time I visit

my mother in her bed and my father on the road

it humbles you

it teaches you the fury of youth is a paper storm

I pray one day my own children

will forgive me and learn this truth also

to quiet the mind and listen

I have eaten

2019 · Mingji Liu

I have eaten
the pizzas
that were in
the Costco Food Court

and which
you were probably
saving
for a family of five

Forgive me
they were overwhelming
so oily
and so gross

July

2019 · Mingji Liu

Half a year has past
and I want to burn down the library again,

Give away all my books and

Wipe clean all my photographs.

Let the seed of last week and the

Week before know that it is now ashes

Made from fire. Who needs friends.
Who needs these colleagues.

Who needs this halfway through space

House with its roof and desk and muslin

Veil to the same old, same old street.

I want to relearn meditation.

Delete the old mistakes and delete

The old forgiveness.

So laborious to think why this nation,

Why these meals, or these words.

Let January have them. February

Take them. March and April fail

And disappoint. May and June

Not even mention them.

Burn down the library, the clock shop,

The orchestra pit.

I want to lose track of it all.

Junctures in the gorge

2019 · Mingji Liu

After the early trudge up red dirt,

After the nearly-slips on muddy downs,

After the steel gripped clamber and bough balancing acts,

After John took a tumble and bled from his temple,

After the whiskey pause and cliff stretched photography,

After the jokes, musings and errant debates,

There came a point of silence on the trail, when the hills

Became a scumble of argent and an icy, fresh rain

Asperged our faces, so that all we heard was its

Tinkling on the hoods of our windbreakers.

Kowloon Bay

2019 · Mingji Liu

i

As Australia sweated her way through January,
I was on a twenty-sixth balcony in Taikoo Shing,
shivering through anti-depressant withdrawal
into the cold repose of Kowloon Bay. The cruise liners
drowsed at anchor while early morning towboats
churned semen coloured trails into the water.

A thicket of skyscrapers, stolid in their overcast
complexions, skirted the dense hills beyond.
I thought of exile and fadings as my feet cooled
and the drone of the air conditioners,
podded like barnacles on high-rise flanks, sapped
what little energy I carried above my collarbones.

ii

Two months later I’ll be seated in a café
on Lt. Bourke as my manager outlines Conditions of
Return and HR Protocols. Death by coffee cups.
But her questions will become back noise when I spot
them walking by: her with her vulture neck, and him
with his tarry beard. My eyes will follow bitterly.

No one should know envy as much as me.

I’ll be reinstalled the day after: dulled, self-isolate,
craning into my laptop at a lazaretto desk.
My boss will allude to alcohol use, as he did in July,
as he did in September, as he did before I stopped
caring and dropped off the scaffolding of the earth.
Further unease will follow. Further fadings.

iii

—Hong Kong can be beautiful in its concrete chill,
I thought as I descended the Mid-Levels in the
rain. I was still lightheaded from withdrawal

as I made my way through umbrellaed throngs,
down open-air escalators and venule streets.
The metallic smelling drizzle was everywhere.

I wanted to board the Star Ferry at sundown

to see the lights. Those postcard beams, those
towered hues bleeding through the skyline
into winter’s grain. I didn’t know whether it was

my unbalanced chemicals or a lonelier craving
for transitions that made me seek this sight.

Letter

2019 · Mingji Liu

A wrote a letter,

Made me wonder where true love waits.

I told her basic things,

Conventional lines about struggle and settling in,

Knowing that when I sent it off to the countryside

She would never respond.

But I still remember her saying, whispering in

The corridor, “I love you.”

A platonic thing.

Lineage Poem

2019 · Mingji Liu

Forgive me
for my lack of language —
my skin is yellow,
my throat uneducated.

Peregrinned. Jumping into
a town which is not my own.
my great grandfather’s

Ashes are returning home across Taiwan Strait

But stop — this is not my home.

My home grows from nowhere,

Is nowhere. A destination

Without end.

On a blue brittle

Ord. Kneel before all

Gods, all nations,

All home.

You are their guest and you

Have forfeited your soul.

Like leaves buffeted

In a school yard,

There are no apologies

That feel true

To your heart.

Not this, where I am.
I leave you: roots.

That day and such are

Rolling, escaping violently.

Deep breaking, skin tones

Tearing like fruits.

Tines of blood,

Trails in the cloud like seed.

These milestones

Have nothing on them.

They are just lumps

On limestone

By the roadside.

Longing horizons

2019 · Mingji Liu

Child rummaging through hush and closet dust,

to put an eye against the keyhole of a hideaway box.

Pins and latch way to starry mysteries

beyond this sufferable, migrant apartment.

Other families hoarded treasure, storied, time swollen,

so what could he eke from tin’s rattle and cough?

*

Fist monster. Giant palm. Finger dragons.

Torch head nuzzled in a small fist,

benthic diaphanous red under gripped light,

under blankets like ancient caves in reference books.

Cartographed veins. Nail markings.
Fantasising depths, pulsing quotidian skin with a bulb.

*

Furtive whispers in illness. A strike of ghost sounds.

Lying in bed, passing feverish till the world grew cleaner,

sharper in forms. The wallpaper seized its argyle focus,
the ceiling throbbed, then myopia came

and blinked fog into naked knowledge, such that
no flight of books, no demitasses of medicine could catch.

*

Yoke headed youth, drag of blind fantasticals.

A boy stumbling, smashing his plate glass way into adulthood.

A mirror wet craving and a realization

that I still saw myself, childlike,

carving through a stuffed closet, lingering on stray

shadow play, scratching purblind lines into a page.

May Tanka

2019 · Mingji Liu

Sitting on a chair

beside the rain,

I close and let it fall in.
To be so greedy —

I want it all.

Midday iron

2019 · Mingji Liu

Forty year old soccer mother, graying Hippolyta of the community gym
— the snap of pink rubber on the hard temple talons of black iron

and up and down she goes with her chin so effortlessly as if she were

a serpent undulating vertical. Then the pump jacking of a medicine ball

with dull, thirsty thuds. She is shouldering the barbell, atlas-like above

the television channels, forcing herself and all the metallic pressure.

Bracing the motion up and thrust not of violence, not of grace, not

of mathematical routine, but a trigger point for the mind. To build what?

This woman on her lunch break? Not to lean or sex herself up for a

Snap or to grunt like so many topless biceps and pectorals under dumb

Weight. Her strongwoman act is for herself, for her sanity’s sake. To

Lift herself and life herself for her children, so no exhaustion

Can strip the brunt of her true workout: Motherhood.

Mildly useless

2019 · Mingji Liu

Poetry is useless,

Meditation too,

It all falls apart,

Two by two by two

The economy is probably useless too
—plumbing the mathematics of the uncountable.
When the revolution comes
And my head’s on a spike.

Everything about me, useless
— such futile legacies!

I’ll never believe in God, or any kind of salvation
— and I hated how

The college reverend preached,
But, Christ, I loved the signing
In chapel.
The hymns, the stir

Of Strowan Stream and the light
On the stained glass.

Moment to moment

2019 · Mingji Liu

Time cools
All boundaries,

Hence the hardening of lattices like
A pillar of salt committing to a shoelace
In a dusty classroom beaker,
Ergo the fraying of bandage coloured
Margins on a child’s wet elbow
As the bicycle wheel ticks.
All our illative conjunctions: gristle.
No inference can satiate the stomach.

The sighthounding sprint down
College hallways, a hammer of feet

On diamond stained carpet.

And behind tight doors, the moans,
The signs,
The carnality of fractured animals
Plunging into their mirror selves.

For there is only relief in raw seconds,

In the time it takes for a swanning leap,
Brave! brave!
And into faith too incomplete.

Stand there now: As cars hurry a
Palm lined street into night.
Stand, even as runaway meetings bring
Shadow sadness — the low, svelte
Feeling that comes when music falters
& divorcees blend.
Dance to its very end. Sway to

The sodden reality of it.
Not fake time, not fake time
Wrung from church clappers or
Alarm squares with black circuits,

But ingest the true rhythm of it.
Everyday loss, the carious-in-progress;

The truth that drills from the
Womb scanner’s eye to the
Cloth bearer’s shoulder.

A curtained thought that arrives
Only in nursing chairs, gently reposed
.
Meditative from moment to moment.

Only then and only then

Can we finally say

‘It’s time.’

Mt Brocken stands in Canberra also

2019 · Mingji Liu

The witches gather at dead-light,

in the cleavage of oily forest,

and a sulphur-crested maelstrom

rises in shattering chorus.

A bestiary of strangers, men half-snake, half-roo,

clamber the naked dark,

towards a dangling noose.

The homeless howl in Garema

as ravens limp the devil’s yes,

only bus stop drunks can hear it

– starless, unclean, unblessed.

The academies and labs are tremulous

with false fire and thunder clap.

There’s nothing to hold back tonight,

nothing but the night’s collapse.

I never went to Question Time—despite

my dull insistence I would,

never visited an embassy either

—not sure if that’s even good.

Can’t confirm the rumour Burley Griffin

hides a drowned church spire,

and I’ve walked the arboretum just once,

shaved clean by pure hellfire.

Yet I studied there for five stony years,

melted by the curse of brevity.

In the end, I left the capital exhausted,

and thus renounced the art of devilry.

New hobbies

2019 · Mingji Liu

“Writing poetry is a bit faggy,”
*said a gay film major in college
when I told him about my new hobby.
He said this, lighting the velar plosive
while chain-smoking rollies,
dabbing them out like opinions
on the brick windowsill. *“Don’t you agree?”

I took his on board the same way

I took most public polling setbacks—
with resplendent self-loathing
that I was once again poorly made.
Already, the ice seemed thin in college:
Unironed button-ups, a bad haircut,
reeking of tobacco, with two black moles,
Pluto and Charon,
on the bridge of my nose.

This was further proof of my defection
from the land of women and cardio and
being able to explain oneself at parties
without a high rising terminal.

My friend Lily asks,

with crease-mouthed callousness,
whether I thought myself
*involuntarily chaste.

*The phrase stings, nauseates, churns,
so I hammer out a non-response,
with words that don’t stick.
I think of her, and I think of women
with bird names and flower names;
with names like Poppy or Pansy.
I think of Roundup and secateurs

and squishing green aphids
between garden gloves.

Shit, I don’t know. Maybe it

is a bit off (I won’t use the other word).
So what if I did throw down my pen,
many years ex-post,
and pick up something happy?
Like blues dancing, or judo, or skiing down the green circle
to flirt with a short blonde on a powdered slope.
Yes. And then I can

write about how cold and clumsy

I am with all my other choices.

Nothing ever lasts, no matter how much you linger

2019 · Mingji Liu

The little sparrow, a nut-streaked bauble bird, dipped
inside a pothole near the verges and bathed in its
sand. Its bill was a flinty nub; its bib a daub of sable;
its belly like unwashed linen — except it was awash
in itself, joyous in its cleansings, its body-brush and
wing-flap taking the road dust as a gift. There was
nothing less skittish than this passer in its rubbing hole.

In the soccer field, when I was six, we found a sparrow
with a paretic wing. It was a soundless thing, squatting
on the grass. No matter how we coaxed, it refused to fly.
It barely shook and its eyes gave us nothing. A fearful
debate broke out: Would an adult take it? Would a vet? Eventually, the biggest of us, an Indian boy, took it to
the waxy bushes by the car park and came back empty.

What is it like, never knowing what small things
are worth caring about in the end?

What is it like, knowing you can only hold so much?

Observations on the tranquilizer

2019 · Mingji Liu

“There is a method of taming refractory horses in England, by first impounding them, as it is called, and then keeping them from lying down or sleeping, by thrusting sharp pointed nails into their bodies for two or three days and nights. The same advantages, I have no doubt, might be derived from keeping madmen in a standing posture, and awake for four and twenty hours, but by different and more lenient means”

— Benjamin Rush

Door-skull. Kettle-brain. Mind-pipes.
Narrow is the house of my soul.
The smell of lacquer. Leather and carpentry.
Clamber into this spare chair, my friend.
I’ve done so many DAS-21s.
Clamber in and hollow me out.
Curl your pate inside the box.
Stifle a cough, dimples of light.
There are wood shavings everywhere.
The straps seem loose.
Take your jacket off.
I’ve seen this all before,
Because isn’t this always —
The clamouring at the interstices,
Slop of vitellus and albumen,
Oval, oval, oval,
Take enough

And isn’t this always
the case?

Or so you can imagine

2019 · Mingji Liu

Her collarbones glow in the creamy

Mother of pearl light.

Her black V, her bobbed hair,

They are cast in watery gradients

By the dissolving sun.

She writes swiftly,

Working against the evening window.

She kneads her neck.

She dabs her wide tortoiseshell frames

and dips her shoulders into words.

I wish I could touch her shoulder

In that light.

Briefly connect with it like a static jolt

On my fingertips. Touch it like

Condensation on a stippled glass.

There’s a child in a park somewhere,

Crushing leaves in her galoshes.

She’s floating a plastic bag as if a kite,

One of the few left in the world—

Or so you can imagine.

Pen

2019 · Mingji Liu

Do you remember, the Parker Pen
I got when I was Dux?
This was the nicest gift I ever had,

Growing poor as I did.

But I lived in an arrogant fog,

Son of immigrants.

I didn’t understand its value and when
The ink wept from the nib, I thought it

Was broken and threw it away.

How could I have had such

A lacuna in my mind.

(Of course, I always had so many

Lacunaes in my mind.)

I didn’t understand affogato.

I didn’t know how to drive.

I didn’t understand so many

Things. Things!

I was so smart, but I was

Fog.

There’s so many things

I didn’t understand then and so many.

My parents, I fear, never

Taught me anything, never.

Or they taught me the wrong things,

So I learnt to stop trusting

Anyone but myself.

Pissing in the snow on the side of a mountain pass

2019 · Mingji Liu

It was as easy as stepping away from the car

While my friends were putting on the chains, retreating an amiable

Distance to stand in front of the choicest snow pile,

fumbling with my zipper as though I were looking for my keys.

I watched a golden arc pierce into cold ivory, steam erupting

Like a fumarole. A range rover passed by and I thought about

The fountains in Dutch cities, with bronze boys tinkling in the bright sun
while seagulls croaked and tourists ate their ice cream.

I am a man after all and this is my nemesis, the mountain.

Our relationship is obstacle and passage and I am pausing to carve

Into its frozen strength. All pine and whiteness,

Wind, corn snow and a morning stunned.

If this was a garden, then I’d say

I was feeding the hydrangeas at night.

If I was bobbing in the ocean, then I’d dedicate this to the waves.

I am not leaving I’d say. I am staying put, The shore is not for me.

But the trail is cold, a thin bloodless vein to the ski fields.

In another season there will be horses and cyclists

And retirees in campervans. But for now, only a world

Holding its breath and a forsaken ascent

Into hard pearls of time and no man’s land to be crossed.

This is the point of the journey, I suppose, where it is so thick with longing

That the only fire left, enough to stir a comatose land, is that inside us –

a heat that we carry deeper and deeper into the mountains.

Poplars

2019 · Mingji Liu

a line of steeples,

the sparrows are their steeple-jacks
cleaning them for twigs —

rustle their yellow-green slate,
ring that cirrostratus note,

they are docking spires of the sun.

early morning trucks race by
their shadow thin flanks,

dumping road kill on the parish —

dashed crow,
possum crush, hedgehog flats,
murdered pilgrims of callow trunks.

church tree,
fence tree, guard tree,

the ditch behind them is clovers thick —

buffered from consequence,
the poplars lance the firmament with giddy,
artisanal confidence.

in denuded joy,
I pluck a grass strand for my lips,
but no pastoral fancies avail —

it tastes of sour, buttery dirt,

the hum and tragedy under land.

better taste the high-slung air, metallic,
and scaffolding trees.

Prompt

2019 · Mingji Liu

(For Samara)

I ask her for a poetic prompt during
a long afternoon at our cubicles.

my colleague cranes over her screen
to suggest I write about a mouse.

“No, no — I mean a computer mouse.”
She grins with dusk-glowing cheeks.

but I don’t want to write about that,
and I don’t want to wax about bulldog clips, either.

I want the real thing: the sniffling, scampering thing,
with beady `alertness for seclusion, for sweetness and for danger.

I want to write about pigeonholes that tuck warm coos,
not ones that collect credit card brochures.

I’d rather write about my prompter —
about how her hair stole salt and pepper,

or how she rations her attitude with a flair;

about her mischievous, accented laugh,
and the wool of her hugs after a long stint abroad.

I want to write about a mouse, only a few weeks young,
probing his way out of a cardboard maze.

I want to see him smell the pungent straws with pink curiosity,
and paw the paper like a little drummer.

I need to do a good thing each day, I tell myself.
I need to carry myself with lightness and do one little thing.

rabbit mind

2019 · Mingji Liu

rabbit woe,
rabbit light,

a fleet jumping on trains,

into city streets,
chasing instinctively the on-snout replay,
desperately coursing paddock to paddock,

transgressing across turf,

as I walk along the sidewalk in communing,

herd-like throngs.

rabbit, kicking, rabbit, thrashing,

rabbit blood on wired barbs,

tufts of fur in my hair,
my cough of ears and tail matter,

a pawless mass expelled.

maddened, petrified, coward rabbit!

myxomatosis minded and choked pill form

rabbit on its hoar white hind.

its rump wiggles, fox fearing

on the dew slaked lawn.

Radif

2019 · Mingji Liu

For Samara Cooper

There’s an aftertaste of liquor from this skull-dark music,

As we dance in your crown, electrified with music.

Who stamped your table? — a spin, a beat of silver,

Who bribed your stand — to charge us for our music?

A witness. A witness and a tree. A mountain is

Growing lonely from roots of mistuned music!

lightness/darkness, fineness/coarseness, to quote
warmth/cold, being/non-being… your favourite little music.

Scholars squint at fairy tales in musky, noon bazaars,

Thrusting their oils deep into fragile jars of music,

While angels banter on pinheads, and susurrate our

Labours. Not long now, till we hear their phantom music.

Four months peregrinned and four days rested;

Forgive me lord for reading only forty sheets of music!

The south-end drunks swagger from their temples, into

Streets mouthwashed by cars, scuffed by asphalt music.

Cut robes for a cat, asleep as your babe, it has supped

On sweet purring, a miraculous, self-made music.

Or gasp on this planet, this clinic we sicken in.

Dying, we beg the nurses to turn off the music.

A tap, a shadow alighting on my window sill —

Brings small mysteries to every attempt at music.

Reading Heaney

2019 · Mingji Liu

I read Heaney talk of ‘touching tongues’ under a bower

and suddenly I was in Adelaide beneath a eucalyptus tree

where light hands once pushed and did the same to me.

The sonnet ended and my nostalgia succumbed to

a strike in my heart, the harsh ping of country gravel

on a windshield, as past regrets were sharply unhealed.

I had refused to know myself, refused to run a thumb

along the stress cracks, serrated with anxieties, in my head.

Rather, I had simply let the webbed wound spread.

She was scared of my glassy flesh towards the end,

darkly pressed like silica under mountainous heat,

when my composure burst and I caved, my core incomplete.

A flash strikes a tree and its bough falls with a crunch

of naked fibres. This brings the yellow-vested men to our street,

who cleave the whole tree down like a haunch of meat.

Rootless

2019 · Mingji Liu

I feared for a while that
If I died, prematurely—or perhaps not,
my parents would steal my ashes
Back to China and jar them in
Some stony foreign prison. Shame me
In quietus through the spit of tradition,
The lie of grubby roots.
A final terminal insult.

I’d rather grace a dumpster in
Australia than have that happen.

The terror was so much, I actually
Called my mother to ask.

Rusty nails

2019 · Mingji Liu

He drummed a slower one as the night rolled on,

and unfurled into the countenance of a peaceable man.

Gautama of the pub row. Equanimous to footy fans

and dimmed, garage aesthetics. Pacing, instead,

in koans around old new friends and new old ones,

claiming sure-footed

heart-truths

after a couple on the rocks. A clear-seeing theory

as to the recipe for strong company and good drinks:

One part Drambuie, four parts Scotch, and

enough time to find one’s proper place on dry land.

Sand castles

2019 · Mingji Liu

Digging into the sand,
I wanted to make great castles —

I saw in my head scape great trenches,

Parapets, ramparts, soaring towers, bridgeworks.

Forts of the like I would later see in Rajasthan.

Digging in with my trowel,

It is not long before I hit the sand worms.

Hairy, pincered, seaside uglies. Furry

And pulsating like bad, soured band-aids.

Swarming, angry at my intrusions from

The taint of the sodden underearth.

Beasts from below. Angry at disturbance.

Foul things underground where cities collapse.

Towers fall, churches fall. Bridges snap

Like crackers and there is nothing

To rebuilt it but the sand it reconstituted into.

We’d have to build and build again,

With harder stuff, or so we think,

But soft foundations prevail — that is the

Flesh itself. The stone made sand, which

Glistened with the stuff of brittle glass.

Futility for squarings – what else if not that?

A sweep, flat, barren place to make your

Peace with. Not even fit for worms.

Schubert

2019 · Mingji Liu

I congratulate my housemate, who was

Thirty-two and a day hungover, you are

Now have now outlived Schubert when

He died. Schubert who was practically

A virgin when he died. You can tell some

Times – his Hungarian melodies are a

Virgin’s music. Staring out at his brother’s

Window at the cold misery of Vienna’s

Streets, watching the women walk by

Until he died from

Syphilis. Anyway, the point is — you

Are not Schubert despite your guitar

Lessons and half-a-credit in music theory,

You have outlived Schubert and that’s what matters.

One more year and you’ll be the same age

Jesus died. Or so the saying goes.

Jesus, I wonder whether he

Died a virgin, stapled to that tree for

Jewish insurgency. Did the women

In Rome ruined Sepphoris notice him, a lowly

Tekton in the hot sun slugging bricks for the half-built

Jewish palaces? That’s a thought, isn’t

It for people who willnever attend church

Or pass the fires of time. Skipping over

This age and that, like milestone

Markers down a long road that doesn’t

Seem to end but eventually will.

Shark teeth

2019 · Mingji Liu

When my mother first heard me mincing milk teeth in my sleep, she thought I might’ve had worms.
But when her doctor confirmed gook medicine

had no echo in reality, she simply forgot the matter
and let me mash my jaws into manhood.

It took me twenty years to notice the signs:
The unusual lunar crescents of my bicuspids,

and my spasmodic pillow headaches. I had a knife
against a water stone, a gristmill in my cheeks,
sanding my enamel with a persistence that brings down sandstone, one apostle at a time.

From my dentist, I received a tut tut and a cheque,
as he moulded my first night guard. From my friend, a condesc coo as she watched me fumble it
into my face. My very own chew toy,
A wonder shield for my mouth.

I’m almost certainly swallowing microplastics
every night, like fish in the open seas.
But without it I’d be drooling gums by forty,
for I’ll always be uroboros, a self-cannibal worm,
attempting to eat myself alive in every dream.

I envy the shark. The lean, prowling whitetip.

Rows of teeth to grow and break and grow right
back again. Nature permits him grind away to his
soul’s content, to chew up his entire jaw amidst
nightmares about propeller blades and gaff hooks.

Silos

2019 · Mingji Liu

I put my ears up to the silos

to listen to the murmurings of
a demobbed harvest — no longer
yellow helmets at attention in the
dusting fields. No more bleached
wind and no more forced drownings
in fossil water — they are pearls
now, unshackled from the ground,

awaiting transport within their
silver, sun-dazed towers.

I press the unnatural arc of my back
against man’s oldest employer.
Dry grass, weathered dust, the awkward
prod of pebbles — they cling to my
shirt with magnetic force, drawing
me close to the trembling grain
trucks, close to the wire posts
in the chirping heat. An awareness

of both terroir and unbelonging
ripples through me.

I am disarmed by my disconnect
from vast, sunken acerage; by my
ignorance of their hungry motions.

I carry this restless note all the way,
on my unbroken drive
back to the city.

Sitting in a treeless clearing

2019 · Mingji Liu

Sitting in a treeless clearing, tower bloated and

Shadow painted, ringed by brick toadstools where

Smokers lurk, their yellow butts like

Sycamore seeds scattered on brown grave —

I confess to him that I want to resign.

Resign from work, I say, when what I really mean

Is ‘resign from my failures’, resign from this counting,

Resign from people, from myself, from God, resign from loneliness, from lists, from women, From fear and ungratefulness and resignation itself.

 

I am a foreigner here, I say. I don’t belong.

He, once a close friend, looks at me

With sad cow-eyes. His mind calculates soundlessly, like a watch

That is too perfect, too exactingly made.

‘Who belongs?’, he replies — as though that simple retort

is enough to plug a glass bell on feelings I

cannot put into words.

Belong where and belong with whom. The gall of it all!

It is not enough to make such retorts when my own skin crawls with uprooted want.

Who belongs and why.

Sleep is the country

2019 · Mingji Liu

Sleep is the ending country, the dot on the hour’s drift.
Sleep is the final taking, the taking of a soft eclipse.
Once a knot of sinews, tied by the theatrics of light.
Once a tireless craving for towered, conscious delights.
Now the day unclenches as fortune falters the mind.
Now the form lies naked, peeled from metallic time.
A body of slackline rope, sagging without any demands.
A body aboard a catboat astoop at the edge of the strand.
Sleep is the ending country, and the archivist has gone home.
The bankers light is failing, the pillows swallow gloom.
All that remains is the painter, the painter of all closed eyes,
A painter of lions and jungle, of everything false that survives.
So sink into the beyond, the oasis of the milky way,
For sleep is the waiting prairie that howls at the end of days.

Spring Rain

2019 · Mingji Liu

Sweeping away the exhaustion of the day,
A winter’s bay with tired neuronal chatter,

Wanderings, monk-like, collecting morsels

During a cold spell…

We reveled in the mess of it.

Obscene, toad-fat droplets falling

From the swollen up-under spring sky.
Gutters banked up on Daley Road.
As cars swam by, their taillights like swan butts,

Spreading fat water wings onto the

Sponge green lawn.

Grey light — what happy light.

Turned far beyond morose and into

Storming ecstasy as we ran out into it

Dragging pearls of laughter through the

Flooded asphalt, giggles rocketing into

Cloudburst, filled up with juvenilia.

I was drenched. My pants were cold.

Ellie’s breasts soaked through her shirt.

My eyes were bloodshot, as if I’d

Been gouged by nature as the cost of

Enjoying nature. A reminder that rain was not sterile,

But a falling of life itself, grit, gristle, pollen,

Gases, the breaking of earth’s fast.

St Georges ellipsis

2019 · Mingji Liu

Sun stretched. Bent out of time.

Yellowing, rolling, bell struck cycle line,

Centre zipped in opposing traffic streams,

Irregularly scruffed by subtropical greens…

Subtropical greens? Who signed off on these things?

With their palm fronds in failed leaf burst —

Mendicants of bungalow and shuttered stores

For a beachside delusion in the inner north.

Planning their return, no doubt, to a suburban

House with three TV channels and Reader’s Digests

on the mantle. Back to our parents in sunglasses,

Posing as lovers on long weekend driveways.

Sparse ellipsis trees, dotted out of fashion.

Right in the middle of two opposing streams.

Right in the middle of a dusted, parching dream.

Stare far enough…

2019 · Mingji Liu

Stare far enough into an overcast space
so that both your eyes begin to strain.
Consider the fins on a weather vane,
wrought iron yet labile. They can face
any chance; they can perform their duty
in a gambolling white breeze or in mute
and robbing frost. Share in their refute
of cardinal routine and sheltered beauty.

Only fools make roosts in claims of closure,
thinking plucked twigs will glisten and hold.
But don’t climb in; don’t try to grip their views.
By all means, visit their steep enclosures
to learn what is conceited, stagnant, told —
just be sure to flee while you still can choose.

Tanka for a mouse

2019 · Mingji Liu

paws on coral sand
once circled a fading cay,
eyes that once saw waves
now only see endless blue —

the colour of no-return.

Tanka for a split tree:

2019 · Mingji Liu

The parting of leaves
To the tautness of black wires -
My room now has light
Because an old tree was cut
Where it touched too much sky

Ten Castes of the Yuan Dynasty

2019 · Mingji Liu

A high bureaucracy of lights — a shuffling paperwork dawn — overcasts — prosaic vespers — the perfunctory blink of street poles

Who watered the London planes today? Which petty official recorded their root-stirs under kerb and gutter?

a woman in the dog park, thumbing a mindfulness app: there remains only blessed Nibbana, the uncreated, the unrealised.

Overheard by the espresso maker: I dwelt in rituals & pathways… elixirs & methods… named the eternally nameless…

Physician. Prince of Small minutes. Prince of Mellow hands.

Inside every room, an artisan is willing to work when the clouds are right.

the carpenter in her cosmos beats in metal stars

the vault of the workwoman showers ancient wood dust

(And the bordello of the head is chattering quick desires)

It was said that after the First Emperor fertilised the earth with Confucian scholars the bulrushes began submitting to the willows, the peonies began honouring the chrysanthemum.

I am on beggar’s knees, tugging on next month’s arrival. I am on beggar’s knees, trying to glimpse what remains of this one.

The calendar floats

2019 · Mingji Liu

The calendar floats
Above a tidied pantry,
Its picture untouched
For at least two summers now—
Why have I ceased marking time?

The calls

2019 · Mingji Liu

It always seems I forget my mother gave birth to me.

It always seems my tongue wields a captious lash.

It always seems the tower of family crumbles down

the bluff when we start yelling across the gulf.

Every word soaked in riddles,

pidgin and misconstrued, wedged by two time zones,

three thousand memories apart.

A half-promising phone call shatters

into chenglish shrapnel and unresolved grievances.

It’s unavoidable with her.

I’d call it chinese whispers,

if it weren’t so racist and so true.

It always seems a complication has a complication,

a mistranslation of words rended by

a mistranslation of the soul

If only I could pivot the cosmos,

she’d be some unaccented Anglophone, and I,

her perfect mandarin, composed and understood.

If only I could pivot a galaxy,

to fuse the rift of parent and son,

to fuse the rift of first generation and second.

Yet the calls happen and it always seems

babel is inevitable because of who we are.
No mother. I can’t explain this in Chinese.

No mother—please just listen to me—

The evening is a swell of nameless sounds and

I’m tired of repeating myself.

I’m tired of repeating myself.

The church of the sea

2019 · Mingji Liu

Crab parish on the stony jags,

intoning the grey, the filthy foam.

Their tidal holes are monstranced, with grit, with weeds,
with bric-a-brac encrusters.
Gatherings around the driftwood,
both planchette and altarpiece.

What do they divine?

Garbled, furtive latins… hippoglossus
hippoglossus, caretta caretta,
huso huso… stirring the sediment with decline.

Ghost nets gloom above a seabed chaparral
where only holothurians contemplate.

Polyps in starveling charterhouses
turn febrile beneath the wash. A fast of yearly ejections.

And the seabeasts, upon their hides, have broken faith; they’ll soon need rites of their own.

The Coldest Comfort

2019 · Mingji Liu

A crippling fear of living in a south-facing
Bungalow, as bored and old, sinking into
A beige sofa as a hunchback pensioner
Drools at the wallpaper in brick walled
New Zealand. I say my greatest fear is
Dying alone and all I get is a contemptuous
Chortle.

They’ll all be divorced by forty.
The coldest comfort I ever received.

No time to breath in and be miserable
Like me. To be as bitter as a grubby root.

They work hard, deep into the night

Because they have people to go home to
And I am crippled, alone.

The Flowers

2019 · Mingji Liu

It does not matter
if these are happy
or unhappy flowers.
These are stockyard
blooms, monstrously
plump from sepal

to anther, pregnant
with colours and
grown to be cut.

Penned in their
glass gardens,
out of season and
windlessly sealed,
they are force fed
water and light
until they open
spotless towards
the butchers.

The headsman laces
their necks with sprig
and silken veil.
Hecatomb petals.
Ritual cone of flowers.
Let your lovers roll
in these perfumed
beheadings.

The underworld
must be infinitely floral.
Rivers of blossoms,
caverns filled with them.
Unbrowning, unbruising,
an afterlife choking
on vivid bouquets.

The last wedding

2019 · Mingji Liu

I can’t help but dive down
A wine dulled foxhole
During the toasts and chatter,
As memory bombards me
With shatters of unkind regards.

I sup to the lucky rain that
Tinkles the man and bride, that
Wet dogs the aisle and
Drools along the pavilion in
All its blanche traditions.

I sup to my mizzling pain,
Half filling my half filled cup
With an ache that knows two parts:
For she’s been invited also,
With her new husband in tow.

In the cornice of my senses,
I can sniff her naped perfume.
From my bar top in the corner,
I still stroke her sequin gown —
So I drown myself and drown

My gelded skull into the liver
Bog. I’ll water this vestal night
Under six dark years of slurry,
Until I’m staggering rough
And pissing into a trough.

Like a fool, I inhale the dance
Floor, flailing myself at some
Inane, pup yapping band.

I hate my skin so much,
I’m crocked from want of touch.

Like a bolt gunned pig,

I slip in my fluids and curse
God. I am an involuted animal
Fading amidst the plates and grog,
Yielding to past as epilogue.

And with a final self mutter,
I claim self-destruction in
Chess terms, like positional
Disadvantage or material loss.
Yet I’m the one who is the toss.

At last, the guests melt away,
Slicked in sweat and lust.
They’re of the night and I am not;
Their bodies coupling into sleep
As I sob beneath my motel sheets.

The Life Drawer

2019 · Mingji Liu

I tried to approach her gingerly at first,
but my pencil snagged on her hips
— too angular, too small, too exacting in my nib.

So I tried for flared, orchestral strokes,
pouring charcoal into her breasts.
No good. By the time I reached her chin
it was lost in fatty rubbings.

Nothing frustrates like the face, of course.
The nose a cipher, her lips unsketchable ,
and those eyes —
occasionally, I met those eyes in her pose
and shied away. They seem so dangerously nice.

Still, it’s more filling than trying to pluck
the essence of a plum or a half-lit vase.
Squinting awkward lines into awry limbs,
mustering my fingers to scribe their pillowy
curves into a chalky, scratching idiolect of my own.

After class, the model, in her watery robes,
approaches. How did you go? they say. *Can I see?
*I shiver at my papers and cannot bear to show
her my translations of humanity.
Again, I quickly shy away.

Three in the morning

2019 · Mingji Liu

They might have been astronomers for all we knew,

Two black teenagers on the roof next door,

Watching the moonless night for thread and glimmers,

Or philosophers of sorts, puzzling over what a roof over

One’s head feels like to sit on, touch, caress.

Mathematicians, chronographers, timing the cause-and-effect

Which led to the rush of police cars, a dozen

Officers and two padded dogs, cordoning off the street

Outside my bedroom. Shouts, torchlight and standing

In our garden and on our bins to bring two skinny black teens

Back down to earth, away from galaxies, stars, moons,

The nebulae of lights blinding from the crown of police cars.

Toothfulness

2019 · Mingji Liu

A false view to pine hills and sunset is tacked to the ceiling;
A metaphor, surely, for my own illusory world building.

As I attempt to apply sati upon the dental engine, it jerks me
Upright and shoves its own awareness, pure as an air jet,
Between my stretched lips, a complete letting in of five
Milky fingertips, squeezing my succulent gums for defection.
No aversion now. As the pirate hook scrapes repentant barnacles
Off dark molars, I tune into my own breaths rather than the
Panting of physics. Let perception, as dispassionate and prosaic
As traffic lights, guide my skull. The pain energy is brief:
A spiked flash from storm cloud to ground rod. I switch my gaze
Into the wellspring of spittle in my mouth. Rinse now.

A minty swoosh from a tiny white cup and then I spit. A thread
Of green dribbles down my chain-linked bib and I am infant
Chinned once more. I’m told to bite down hard on a metallic
Square tied to a rod. Clench and don’t move. The technicians
Stand, like bomb diffusers, in a bunker closet while X-rays blitz
My cheeks. Clinically observe these nerves; don’t fuel its rush,
Just watch. And remember: This happens only once a year.
More grist for the wheels rolling within my meditative jawline.

Train poem

2019 · Mingji Liu

Tufts of tussock
Like so many heads of
Sheep dotted over
The ironed fields.

Black cattle grounds,
Gaunt and listless.
A tree in the centre
Like dark tentacles

Or a mast of claws.
The parched gully
Carves a lightning bolt
Into caked country.

My train wheezes
Across the rail bed.

I am stuttering and
Shivering towards you.

Towards you as you
Telemark down a fresh
Slope with your partner
In the Klínovec ski fields.

The thigh deep snows
Must be a purity of
Form, a simpler joy
Than my window seat.

You danced coyly up
Against me in that
Speakeasy jazz room.
Why were you closing?

I kissed your hair
At that house party.
Wine sweating, lopsided,
What was I making?

The flirts and cakes
And coffees and BBQ
Invites to mine. Christ.
The hell were we leading?

People noticed, you know;
Lines were murmured
About our soft boundaries.
I bet you never told him.

Brain beggar. Singleton.
Panhandling legitimacy
From your company.
Sham duet. Dry cravings.

A burst of sparrows,
Dark in their flight,
Crosses the low wires.
I tremble your returning.

Fences. Stockyards. Silos.
I keep forgetting what
A tired country this is.
Tired and beautiful.

travel story

2019 · Mingji Liu

compose me your lyric, a verse in your life,
of sculpted Americas whittled by knife.

a brush across mountains painted with light,
and the music of grasslands recorded at night.

the forests who dance their limbs into green,
and tapestry coastlines, woven with sheen.

the theatre of cities like acts from a play,
its secrets in darkrooms, bathed in a tray.

so make art from travel, make pieces anew,
I’ll wait on your story — the story of you.

Untitled poem

2019 · Mingji Liu

i was reading ee cummings when she
mentioned

another boyfriend &suddenly
ee cummings was ruined forever

Vodka Tanka

2019 · Mingji Liu

First a sip, then

a hot lap of vodka.

Cold glass, alone,

a break in tradition

from you.

Voices

2019 · Mingji Liu

I think of the dark liquor in my headphones,

A thousand ear buds drunk on poetry that

They don’t even know is poetry.

Great concrete ears in England, so they could hear

The twenty miles out like a hummingbird of a gnat.

Voice to blot out face and memory,

A blue toothed cell within a train’s sigh and screech.

Wednesday

2019 · Mingji Liu

I sat in the dim of my desk and drifted to

A long school field back in Fendalton, Christchurch.

Poplars and a wooden fence for the sleepy slat

Houses whose sad or happy or lonely people you never saw.

Clear blue. Soft summer. And school’s out.

Only the mower clearing the grass where

We once chased men. Or the little stream –

Clean boundary line between the field and houses

With their little clothes lines and bushes and

Deck chairs. Little stone pads in the icy water.

So cold when you dipped your feet.

No birdlife. Just silt. I go to this place in my

Mind sometimes. As though it were a dream.

When we serve tea

2019 · Mingji Liu

the shadow of pine, evidence of wood smoke in the empty square of a tinplated caddy —

the gentle brown stains around the bony lips of china, so resistant to the rub —

it is true there is neither good nor bad tea in this house, only skilled and unskilled cups —

exquisite or bitter greens, stewed or impatient blacks, the steam does not care from which it rises

for the flushing pot is all that matters — a leaf served with melancholy or blissfulness,

or with wild infatuation to someone unrequited — the tea you cannot take back or apologise for.

only pour and pour in passing.

Yarra

2019 · Mingji Liu

We have no use for riverine sophistry.

When the Yarra turns,
She grows corpulent on alluvials.
Binge drinks rainfall with midlife desperation;

An urban soup storm, she wallows over
Raggedy grass and slurps up cycle paths
Into her brown regress.

Great, uncleansing muck rush!

She bloats towards the bay, towing a
Procession of branches, drowned ducklings,
and trolleys lost with all hands on deck.

No sluice gate can contain her wealth:
All must hold their breaths.

As shadows wind down the rain,
Amorous frogs, invisible among the musky reeds,
Sing a deafening, jubilant round—
For waters rising and waters falling;

For everything she embraces
And then carries into death.

you have built

2019 · Mingji Liu

call me Hadrian’s, call me The Great,
name me ten-thousand more,
but never forget who urged your
hands away from neighbours,
who pushed your fingers into
the carnality of clay and gypsum
so I could stand, stand again—

—higher than a human shout,
a circle of motionless strength
to girdle every square and factory.
you have built bricks on every hour.
bricks in every utterance. bricks
that do not perspire, that form
an indivisible image of—

—a looted, etherised past.
so mix my slurry in dimness
and ignore your spinal ache,
your hips souring from the tilt.
ignore it. there is no rest. not till
the horizon is scaffolded; not till
the clouds themselves are fortified.

you’ve served beautifully.
so why do your children refuse the call?
why does your son find stepping stones across
the creek?
why does your daughter plant flowers in
the riprap?
why do they ignore exigency? ignore my purity by partition?

—you must stop them. beg them
stop. they are pluck ing my slabs like cotton
from a doll. stop. they are crumbling down my mortar.
tapping out my quoins with bell hammers. I can
feel it. I feel a gaping breeze, sparrow flits,
the invasion of moss, curdled roots,
a brocade of ivy on my colourless rubble.

I am of Jericho. I am of Berlin. of history. I am
all that kneels down when the curtain rises.