Che Qianzi

Che Qianzi [Poetry East West]

from Language from a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, & Beyond, ed. Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, & Ravi Shankar:

Sentences

by Che Qianzi, tr. Jeffrey Twitchell-Wass & Yang Liping

1: A spire in the north. A spire in the south. In the south a nail was pulled out.

2: A half moon, two earths, one earth, very soft when stepped on, very soft shyster.

3: The gods appear to have freckled faces; the masses’ point of view; the rubble creeps over the branches; you are going to hunt birds.

4: A box that cannot keep secrets, darkness and Jiangsu Province, will be reduced to a leaky cage. In the cage there is nothing, the background contains it.

5: A water drop too is curved.

6: Lace words on the cuff, Tailor Song threads the eye of the needle. Shrimp heads twisted off their bodies.

7: Tadpoles drifting between commas, differentiated by their tails, were finally expelled from the fictitious revolutionary troop. Transformed into iron-skin green frogs, with the press of a button they jump without stop, without stop.

8: One sentence is no longer than one character. The character gets a big head. The character becomes a big star. A spire. Ursa Major hammering bright the nails in the north.

9: One sentence circled three times around one character, circling the fourth time it broke.