you won’t write what’s recorded in written history? and you believe you’ll only focus on things completely forgotten?   yeh, I suppose a thread of sun, hang ing on an eyelash   a word that came out of a rice-filled mouth   all the drops of rain that rushed into the ear in that, forgotten, instant   everything born the second they die   Ouyang Yu writes in English and Chinese and to date has published 100 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, literary criticism and literary translation in both languages. His website is www.otherlandpublishing.com.

What is home? Forty years of morning, noon, and night. Tell me about your childhood. Thirty-seven mouths open under a tin roof.   What is happiness? Eighteen in my sailor suit, spray from the waterfall—   Why did you marry? Five years of coins.   How many tears? One thousand, eight hundred, and ninety-eight pearls.   Do you love your mother? Two hands, ten fingers, six children.   How many miles have you come? Sixty-four thousand and twenty-five gull-wings.   Do you love me? The rain falling, falling, over thirteen thousand dawns.     Eileen Chong is the author of […]

Eight wild wood ducks
greet me at the gate,
follow me down to the feed-room, wait
while I get them a handful of seed

Reading Laying the Fire, Andrew Motion   My father managed logs and ash   on chilled mornings in the suburbs   scraping the fire place clean   with a soft brush and shovel   fit for purpose. He swept carefully   holding his breath so as not to breathe   the inevitable delicate dust   of yesterday’s briquettes and wood.   And when done he held up a sheet   of newsprint in front of the new   meticulous pile of twigs and paper,   willing a new day’s fire to spark and catch.   He was confident in this […]

lines on a young lady’s Instagram photo   My palm and pendulum thumb discover how utterly unlike you you look, twelve weeks ago dining in sepia. I wonder if the trigger of your brow, cocked just so, was squeezed beyond the frame that so scarcely contains your delight at being within it. This sleight of lens reveals and obscures an evening now immutable. Your self-portraiture at arm’s length captured a moment that retreats from me, all of a fingertip from the ennui of such considered loveliness.   Jake Davies has had short stories and poems published in a few journals, […]

1. You turn the teapot three times steam rising in stanzas   the same night falling here as on the capital.   Do names call into being the things they signify, or are they always in the wings, waiting for the right cue? Three wet stones and a ripe eggplant. One hand over your eyes. All questions want for answers at least to the untrained ear but listen from without     the tower designed to let down your hair   the finger for tracing a collarbone. Bodies know each other by intention, the ibis in flight a picture of […]

there is a system of pulleys let’s call them the four elements and sleep   there is wind and rain and love drying its tears on a rock   there is gravity that has a switch it takes a rocket to flick   there is the fire that beckons and the fire that dispels   the wind that gathers and the wind that scatters   white sails across the mind’s eye the tortoiseshell of longing   there is earth that whispers finally and islands where the sky weighs anchor   islands of breath that you hold as the blind ships […]

I watched it pass over bleak, remote acreage with a history of cancer clusters and self-harm   yet whatever it was that went by, flapping or locked into the arc of its glide, there   seemed an abundance of light and warmth in its wake, like a scene in David Attenborough’s   The Life of Birds, where geese are coming in over a trapper’s hut the ground in thaw   patched and broken like drying wolf skins the lead bird’s head riddled with high definition   and because I have no name for the vision I’ve been taking the scene […]

Because breath is only childhood cowering in              the belly of the hospital the sound of his footsteps on the gravel outside my bedroom window              approaching the cages and the endless thirst in me, seizing my body and rupturing the bones.               I blindly swallowed the days the way a dog will run until it is lost and I was never here the medication, closer to nothingness than ever being well. myself, a stranger offering a space              […]

In the morning media rustle we look for our vertebrae      our balance, anything sensible           shoes or daycream encase out nipples although      we fancy being free as the train gushes and swallows      tickets and selfies, hi-vis           and daydream Then the city’s coarse daylight opens its cracks      the paving jerk, escalator drag           a last gulp so our mouths might swell      with sexual tannins           a café’s smoke tongue before swipe and thrust Goodbye […]

Today the morning rang me at 6.15
to tell me what I had done wrong
the day before
and what mistakes I must not make today.

Something is taking over the bush
and the woods and the forests …