Amarys Dejai in Conversation with Chinese-American Writer and Filmmaker Haolun Xu
“I often write under the rule that poetry is best written as a way to document life both inside and outside of the poet.”
Durga’s Homecoming
“At the cusp of Ashtami and Navami, / the Goddess slays the Asura. In the fields, / corpses of adolescent girls sway / under the branches of peepul, / as gently as the flowering grass.”
Uncollected love letter (sunflower)
“People ask what i’ve been reading and i say the beats so they’ll go away bukowski might also work i / just want to walk with you not in some time warp but here where the trees break the sidewalk into / dips and precipices”
WINTER AND THE RIVER
“The stars look down / with neither discomfort / nor sympathy, / and the friends I had, / I now rarely see.”
How to disappear a heart
“Forget languages have meaning beyond the lines / you can see on the map. Bear in mind, a heart is a piece no one has / ever seen before, do not try to describe it, do not try to speechify the gaps.”
Blue Cheese
“Brought to life—say risen, say elevated, / also, shaped—by a number of organisms / the human eye could only desire to see.”
Uncollected love letter (bed)
“So i get near the end of The Odyssey where Penelope recognizes Odysseus because he knows the / story of their bed how he built it how she could never take it apart and move it even if she says it’s / gone it’s not gone the bed is still there after two decades”
Sisters of the Earth
“I have called the nymphs from heaven / who are happy to be ridden of Indra. / Tonight, we all friends will sleep together.”
The Soul is the Body’s Faith
“The body only connects us to each other / as much as the myth of the soul.”
Instructions
“If the birds have very little to say about the night before, turn on / the radio for song after song in a language you cannot replicate.”
Aquarium Blues
“My daughter called the whales / elephants and proclaimed that water / was just another version of grass. / She pressed her cheek against the barrier / between us and thought how dolphins / were too smart for the show”
Controlled Breathing
“Breathe in, hold, breathe — the eerie voice / of the CT scan guides me. He sounds / handsome, even debonair, just the thing / for contemplating mortality.”
Father Time is Cutting a Chili
“Seeds are kids playing Ring a Ring o’ Roses. / Placenta, capsaicin glands, and apex; / we are promised a wave, by brilliant crest / gathered onto land and at last broken.”
Blazing desires … (My fevered sighs to you)
“Tonight I was in Venice / My dream was beautiful, colored, twinkling / I saw love’s great, holy temple / And all the snow melted from my heart”
So neat and tidy
“I am broken to the grains scattered / by the fields of forgiveness where / no one stops by.”
