Member Poem

I watched a news program last night. She recorded her deceased brother’s voice as the ringtone of her smart phone. Food in storage. Kleenex in storage. Alcohol pads in storage. You may finally taste how it is like. I am a snail with my home dragging my move. Will I be someone’s ringtone after I leave? I have started reading poems about places. Start from my favorite Chinese poem I studied in my secondary school where and when I had dreams. Lightly I am leaving, just as lightly I came.1 You are all waiting for it to end. It will. For you. Not me. I am an aviary bird with a chained, broken leg. You could soon fly to row along the River Cam. You could soon spend a February evening in New York. You could soon ruminate on weeds and rain next to the Eiffel Tower. Lightly I wave goodbye to the rosy clouds in the western sky.2 Except the perfect round fragment up outside my well where I lie flat at its bottom. I am a depressed frog in a hollow well, befriending the echoes of my own cries, sticking out my tongue to collect every tear from the fragment. That a tear drops doesn’t mean a tear saved. I know. I pray. I am determined to save after I leave. Her brother did. Masks, sanitizers for you. For me. And bags of kidney water. Injection of life prolongs its quarantine. Her brother needed a liver. She needs a heart. We need a kidney. They need a lung. We eat, we drink, we sleep, we work… in shells…waiting, and waiting and waiting for our fate to respond…now you may finally taste how it is like…will you record my voice? 

1 & 2: Xu Zhimo’s poem, A Farewell to Cambridge (1928)