Poems by JINJIN XU
Image by Xu YuanYan
Table of Contents
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JinJin Xu is a writer and filmmaker from Shanghai. She is the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Prize, and her debut chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife is forthcoming in November from Radix Media.
JILL PEARLMAN
One of us sleeping, one of us dreaming with open eyes / strands of your hair in the silver light / when I rubbed the hair in the small of your back, / you awoke to a dog’s sharp nails / You told me it wouldn’t have ended well / in the old country. // You smashing public windows, drunken brawls / in the metro
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AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL
Sometimes when they were young, I felt like / I was underwater and couldn’t make out sounds / or reason or rhyme, only coral clicks and distant / whale songs. A shiver of eel near my ankle. But /
trust me: one day you’ll surface. They start / walking, then running, and then they sit behind / a wheel.
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