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.
GABRIEL SPERA
Gracefully we hold each other / architects and optimists / always at arm’s length like / congenital dreamers / tango masters slinkily coiled / bright candles in a hall of mirrors / whatever I propose you propose / to conquer repeating and repeating / the opposite.
OSWALDO VARGAS
The wheat wants an apology, / for taking me this long / to show my wrists / to the thresher boy. // Finally a summer where he asks how my parents are / and my jaw is ready, / stretched open so he can hear about them, / easier. // I may look different after, / I will need a new name.
AIDEED MEDINA
White women give my father shaded looks./ Bringing babies to do their dirty work,/ mumbled in passing. // I am paid in jelly doughnuts /
for my day on the boycott. // My dad leads my baby brother / to the front of the grocery store doors / for a meeting with the manager.
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