by Cela Xiè
Tab Journal

运 Once again he is the driver.

移 Father, stranger, leader, healer.

云 I no longer want to ride.

火 I want his burden,
柱 the immolation of his engine,

定 the throat of the wind
风 closing before him.

空 I want to be the sword-swallower.

嘴 I want my head in the tiger’s mouth.

坐 Still I drift from one room to another,
吃 carried by the wave that leans before me,

山 a single white shell in his ear,
海 calling the second passenger.

我 I have lived from a suitcase for three years.

毕 I have slept on the floor of the living room
夜 of my mother’s apartment, on a hollow bed;

之 I have trembled in a cell in a room of seven,
后 in a nervous house, in a city of lost angels;

没 I have wanted to die on a pale blue spread
有 on a peninsula at the side of my motherland.

活 I have been lonely, but I have not lived alone.

独 The driver calls me from my dream.
生 I have arrived at one more torn wall.

自 I walk the silver reaches of the shore,
由 and burn for the waves to absolve me.

人 I howl my bike down the night road,
众 and the lights of hotels glide through me.

云 I am the sea that carries me.

乘 I am the rider and the writer.

运 In fall or flight, I am my fate.

游人

运移云
火柱定风
空嘴坐吃山海
我毕夜之后没有活
独生自由人众
云乘运

The Tourist

Fate moves the cloud.
A pillar of fire pins down the wind.
With an empty mouth, I sit and eat the mountains and seas.
After the night ended, I have not lived.
Loneliness is born from the crowd.
The cloud rides on fate.

---

Cela Xiè is currently an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University. His poem “莫 生 Only Absence, No Time” won the AWP Intro Journals Prize and is forthcoming from Mid-American Review. His poetry has been published by Sine Theta Magazine, Tab Journal, and VOLT Magazine. He has a receipt book of poems, Before I Spoke to Myself, published by betweenthehighway press.