Poems from 2022
2 poems written in 2022. All poems by Mingji Liu.
La Dolce Vita
2022 · Mingji Liu
Those two black balls . those mutant gogglings
stark in his pale placental face
As the beachcombers stare back
Back into this son of
Faithless leviathans –
Ended by a trawl line near a cold Roman beach,
…
honey seeped into my dreams again,
or rather, a yellow treacle
of lust and aphasia –
I bedded college girls and colleague girls,
and women of the flower genus
and women of the bird genus
…
women I had never touched,
bodies the years had lapped away,
and yet, somehow at night
I sucked them into curiosity jars,
like Boyle’s bird in the air pump
into hot, dreaming wunderkammers
…
and what sad gill slits,
what bloated pectoral fins,
what cartilaginous angels
will wash ashore these tides tomorrow,
and what possibly could my fallen Peter catch,
if not a draught of monstrous sea worms.
La Malinche
2022 · Mingji Liu
Sharp stark moonlight on her skin
In a forest clearing, near a jaguar’s trail,
As she lies alongside these men of metal
And sulphur and horses,
As she prepares their entry
into her innocent, blood-thirsty world,
…. And could she have?
That night, resting against Hernan’s deadly breast
– Could she have
known her thankless task?
An empire enslaved; an emperor’s shattered skull –
With centuries of grief and chronicle’s plunge,
Centuries of grief and a people born to whisper:
Mother. Murderer. Mother. Traitor. Mother. Creator.
Whore and bitch and mother of us all.
No – no, not that night…
with its bird calls and dimming fires…
She could not have known the only true lesson
those Christians ever taught her:
that we are all descendants of Cain, for Abel had none.