YEAR OF THE FROZEN RIVER

There’s a year I knew how to weep like knowing
every malaise in east Changchun & begonia fruit poulticed with snow.
There’s a year I wouldn’t pick up my phone & forget what to do.
A year with neither rabbit nor love.
A year banished from the prodigy club.
There’s a year I stood up for bruised eggplants. For limping commuters
chided by a busman’s ushanka. That year
I was the accomplice of insomnia, apprentice in winter-morning
erection. I replaced my pillow with a king-size dumpling
floated to the surface of my rolling-boil dream.
That year I’d loiter down Guilin Road after billiards, past the street hawker
touting fried calamari wider than an adult’s face.
The black dahlias of soot on the curb,
ATM guarded by a stone line, & cardboard box housing six chicks for sale,
fuzzy yellow like the ellipsis Buddha wrote with his highlighter.
I’d roller-skate by the former Manchurian council
& Soviet Red Army grave, pee in the bush outside a Korean dog-meat shop.
It’s a year when cheering headlines began to decline.
A year when the moon set not even once in August.
A year when a Coca-Cola wrap blindfolded the emperor.
It’s a year of miscarriage, of hermit crabs’ nests destroyed.
That year I mistook graduation for reincarnation,
cars on a viaduct for silver birds. Bottle caps in mud for scentless sakura.

Qiang Meng (@qi_ang_meng) grew up in Changchun, China. He is now in Atlanta, GA, and writes poetry in English as a second language. His poems have appeared in POETRY, The Texas Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.