Poems from 2021
Some poems written in 2021 by Mingji Liu.
“The Stranger”
2021 · Mingji Liu
Every morning, the sunlight
Arrives like a stranger in your foyer.
A soft ray, a harsh glare,
A momentary flush of gold
Through the cold glass of the door.
Watch as it lifts the dust
From the slumbering hardwood,
Marvel as it sheds off the skin
Of yesterday
Like an old overcoat.
The new day, the known and the not known,
You must greet this light and invite it
In for breakfast.
Open yourself to this daily stranger,
Because they are here to
Create your life anew.
Commissioner Lin interrupts my spliff
2021 · Mingji Liu
I was puffing under porch lights, admiring the stained gables and ivy touched
railings and my graceless attempts at kneading dope with shag
when a face dappled up the inky growth. I rose, unsteadily, to greet my interloper,
but before I could clear my throat, the man was on the creaking boards.
His eyes were fierce beneath his cap, silk tasselled and bauble topped,
with a peacock feather set in its slope. He pointed a pelted sleeve at me
while his necklace, punctuated by corals and berry black cabochons, rattled dice like
from his motions. Tall, aggravated, adjudging, he spoke from lips half hidden
by whiskers about diseased men and foreign predation. He spoke of hard choices,
diplomats, a riverbank. ‘But the Manchus are dead, or in glass jars,’ I replied,
‘your station was lost after the Gardens burned. Crawl back into old books, old man.’
He winced at my odour. He pursed as if to say this one does not appreciate.
‘I come from below a courtly stature also,’ he said. ‘I come from watching ships and
sailors burn at bay, from watching towns wheeze on the promise of a pipe.
I know craving is a mute plague and that to cut the individual bleeds the collective.’
‘And don’t assume I’m oblivious to measures,’ I retorted.
‘I remember climbing the stairs to report sharps in the yard. I know of weights,
coverings, hysterics. I know my limits and my cadences.
My body is sovereign and without legacy.’ To which, he jeered:
‘Boy, you’ve choked your mind. Your reason is chained, not captained by choice.
You perfume consumption after the fact, knowing full well the conflicts in your bones.’
‘Damn you, old fool! Textbooks can rot, and grievances can smoulder
a century more for all I care! How can you bind narratives
with what little I smoke in seclusion?’ But to no response –
he had dissolved, stilling the animus on my porch. The night was mothy.
I stood, blood eyed, as a breeze took away the last of my ash stock.
consort.
2021 · Mingji Liu
lament, artemisia, lament!
rake grief across seedless fields,
pour salt into swollen hills,
scream yourself
into village wells from here to
lycia to phygia to pisidia to
OH GOD NO –
lament, sister wife, lament!
smear my ashes black to broken lips,
dissolve my body in trembling wine
and drink within the mausoleum
of our linens,
serve your subjects
this throat tearing thirst,
courtiers eunuchs dancers emissaries
make them taste what it’s like
to lose a season entire,
make them all know
PLEASE NO –
and know that
no matter how grand
a vow was spoken,
no matter how high
the marble has risen,
I will never return. not ever.
Flowers
2021 · Mingji Liu
It doesn’t matter
if these are happy
or unhappy flowers.
These are stockyard
blooms, monstrously
plump from sepal
to anther, gorged
with colours and
grown to be cut.
Penned in
glass gardens,
windless and
seasonless, fed
with lamp lights
until they reach their
spotless, perfect
place between
the blades.
The butchers lace
their bodies with silk.
Hecatomb petals.
Idol cones of nectar.
Let your lovers roll
in these perfumed
beheadings.
The underworld
must be infinitely floral.
Rivers of blossoms,
caverns filled with them.
Unbrowning, unbruising,
choking in bouquets.
Jul Aug Sep poems
2021 · Mingji Liu
i
Fatigued, in slumber…
Like potatoes in wet earth…
I become my own couch,
Cushion tuber, living room root,
Snacking upon myself…
Feeding, waiting,
Wondering when the
Tiding sun, the hinting spring,
And asperges of sweet rain,
Will give me leaves, flowers
More than roots!
Will give me space like
a dandelion’s space,
To float off, finally, with the wind.
ii
in-grown cheese & wet sock salad
fungal flaked with fresh heel callus
sweats & nails & sweetly scabrous
chow this down, you nummy palate.
iii
the leaves, descend,
falling like ash from
the orange-cold hearth.
they are the dust of seclusion,
a sign that the eyes are closing
for another year.
iv
The dawn, cat-faced, gingerly
glints through the curtains,
purrs into the stainless basin,
and licks at my unwashed cups.
Unloved, or not, she’s a pet that’s always here,
and a life that never stays.
v
There’s a stranger’s tear in my eye,
a meeting in the arcade, after dark,
the tiles like prison bars, the brass
clock in the hanging post, its arms
flung between terrifying before and
the beautiful beyond, clamps down,
vices, and embraces me.
vi
Crushed,
by the stones of sleepless nights and bootheels,
by a chest pressure,
by diving, cranking, torquing scrapyard force,
Crushed,
by thumbs and screw-presses and lead weights,
by voices and fault finding and regrets and grief
Like blind sea animals in a prehistoric ocean,
squeezed through aeons, mineralised and imprisoned,
crushed by rocks into rocks themselves
Crushed,
the fragrance of sesame seeds, crushed, till every drop of
oil is gone, the tartness of grapes, crushed till every dribble
of juice is in the bowl
Crushed
into fragrance, into sound, into memory,
like a god or a curse.
vii
Spring’s dark clouds —
Lilting pressure —
A wheel spins in the child’s hand
viii
Paddock glazed with frost,
Goats bleat for milk,
She opens the gate before sunrise.
ix
man, thrice-godded,
divine and desert,
child of sand and rock,
brings the key to the hole.
battery low,
our stories tell us nothing,
lines on the walls, scratches,
what questions are these
in this time without answers?
xi
Tranced by the pink horizon,
Like a hen by lines
In its sand.
Life model
2021 · Mingji Liu
I tried to approach her gingerly at first,
but my pencil snagged on the hips
— too angular, too small, too exacting in my nib.
So I took orchestral strokes,
pouring charcoal into her breasts.
No good. by the time I reached the neck
I was lost in fatty rubbings.
And nothing frustrates like the face,
The nose a cipher, lips illegible,
and those eyes —
I’d meet those eyes in repose
and shy away. so dangerously nice.
Still, it’s better than trying to pluck
the essence of a plum or a cold-lit vase.
Squeezing awkward lines into awry limbs,
muttering my fingers with
a chalky, scratching idiolect of my own.
After class, the model approaches,
how did you go? she says. can I see?
I shuffle my pages and cannot bear to show
her my translations of humanity.
Again, I shy away.
Poem
2021 · Mingji Liu
For Grace
We spent the whole afternoon,
flinging paper planes
as hard as we could.
We wanted to test
the range and the limits
of everything we possessed.
You tossed your frisbee
down the cul-de-sac,
again, and again,
while I pitched my kite
above the pylons
before snipping the line.
In the end,
we took the family bird
and prised open her cage.
We watched her perch
on the railing, ungainly at first,
before catching the wind
and vanishing into dusk.
I’m sure she’s still out there,
scouting the whole world for us,
tracing longitude and latitude
in spaces we cannot.
Soaring higher than peaks
and dearer than freedom,
gliding over the map
and brushing its edge.
She’s probably still rising,
close to the stars, rising
to the place where celestial bodies are.
Standing
2021 · Mingji Liu
I’m waiting for dawn to grasp with candy-coloured fingers,
waiting for a call about my licence registration,
waiting for them to reopen the FoodWorks and the Freechoice,
waiting for the next election between Broad-Gauge and Vanilla-Cream,
waiting for the poplars to turn gold, then green, then gold again,
for friends to pick their weddings and divorces,
for the return of Halley’s Comet,
for ice caps to become distant memories in nursing homes,
for the erosion of the Pyramids at Giza,
for the continents to fuse into a new Pangaea,
I’m waiting for the Second Coming, for the Age of Krishna, for the death of ignorance, the end of darkness and decision,
for the sun, having engulfed her children, to menopause into a perfect white dwarf,
I’m waiting for colliding galaxies and melancholic black holes,
for the last proton, that quivering dancer, to dissolve into epitaph.
They ask me why I’m standing here —
what there is to see atop the pedestrian bridge down by the tenements —
not much, I try to assure them, and yet everything at the same time.