ONLINE PUBLICATIONS WITH ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPHY
hindsight
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The decade’s interlude leaves us in suspense
before the final act falls. Spring goes on without us. The caterpillars, ripe out of their cocoons, are eating our misery in weight and growing too thin for the pendulum of the wind carried with their wings by flight. From behind private apartment walls, basement suites, the cadence of children’s footsteps pass for May, June, July . . . It’s getting harder to believe this month, that God doesn’t exist when I have so much still to ask for. |
chopsticks
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[1] chopsticks an expression of the heart and determination arrives in pairs[2] [筷] semantic 忄 heart phonetic 夬 determination radical 𥫗 bamboo the heart hurries to light incense prays for another’s week of rain / year of harvest /gentle flood every morsel motivated by determination and pleasure in one’s daily work we collected rain in a pot © Room magazine 2021 |
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I remember
© The /tEmz/ Review 2020
I remember Stories as a kind of land you arrived at And I remember Poetry as both an immigration policy and the destination that was a city wrote me. I remember Road as metaphor for river and its significance to me. |
Dramatic Monologue
© The /tEmz/ Review 2020
You wake me up in the night to ask how strawberry the moon is when the earth is in decline. Outside the country, hungry artists are turning fences into an acrylic pouring of the US-Mexican border. |
Ghazal for phyllis webb
© Minola Review 2019
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I didn’t know the poet then.
A friend back from Salt Spring Island, told me she’d dropped off some books to Phyllis Webb. Phyllis, do you feel the world transforming? This era of digital uniformity, pig-human hybridity. In some parts of the world, they are breeding monkeys with two heads. One kitten whisker in a vault somewhere. I have forgotten the combination. How else to respond but to write as Webb? I open a new deck of index cards. |
Ghazal for the New Year
© The Puritan Review 2019
The ground, a white sheet of frost. No tire tracks yet. Even before I left home, there’s been a family I can’t seem to reach. At a gathering once, my grandfather taught me to kill snapping turtles. You drag its tongue out as far as it can reach and chop it off. In the morning, I will not switch open the blinds. Want to know what it’s like to stay turned off so you can’t be reached. |
spawning grounds
© Watch Your Head 2019
On the south, 76 killer whales left on the brink of extinction. We erect hydro dams and rear fish in hatcheries away from their natural habitat, bring wildlife back into nature, nature back into industrialization: this is what we call rewilding. The bare necessities of hatcheries strengthened through genetic engineering, forced interbreeding, but fish that rely on muscle memory year after year are the ones we see failing to return. |
lunar feast
© The /tEmz/ Review 2018
Filling nursed between the tips of two silver chopsticks, stack of paper thin disks rolled and she cupped them in her hand the way you cup a red lotus at the Lunar parade each year to make a wish. Two fingers dipped into water, edges sealed with neat folds. With dogs, she says, you just need to feed them and they remain grateful forever. |
on forgetting a language
© The /tEmz/ Review 2018
After every class I lay on the ground, rooting myself in the studio’s sprung wooden floors. Back sticky from sweat and rosin, legs raised to the barres where I let them hang. Quitting ballet isn’t like forgetting my first language. Now my family will not talk to me, and I reach for the studios once more, to the place I learned to express words I could not say into sharp, fluid lines honed against music. |
Eleven Stops Until I'm half way home
© carte blanche 2018
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The first time I opened my mouth and spoke, he was taken aback. He was not expecting it.
“So how come you speak English so well?” he asked me. It was my first week of university and the two of us were crowded by the back doorway of the 95 B-line. I took a deep breath in and a deep breath out, before replying, “Uh, school? I guess?” It wasn’t difficult to mask my differences in the beginning. I wasn’t aware of my speech impediment, how I spoke with both a stutter and a heavy accent, or the fact that I looked different from the other children in my class. But then a boy asked me how I could possibly see through those tiny slits of mine and I threw a hole puncher at him. I said, “I just do.” |
Shortcomings of a JUVENILE
© The New Quarterly 2018
My first science lab started out as my mother’s birthday present. Hoping to make perfume out of rose petals and water, I inadvertently discovered decomposition. In an attempt to study the phenomenon further, I left a carrot stick in my room for months. To my surprise, I then witnessed crenation. |
Rain Clouds
It is raining. A woodpecker, seemingly lost, is pecking away at our house, at the cement layers between bricks. While sitting in the car, my mother shows me how to print my name using the condensation: 清, which in Mandarin means clear; water; a bruise. I won’t be needing this name much longer.
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When one dream fails
© SFU English Department Blog
Five years seemed like a long time when I first entered high school. I thought I would have forever to figure my life out, and that by the time I stepped out of those doors, I would have procured a contract with The American Ballet Theatre. That was to become my dream— a prima ballerina dancing Don Quixote on the world-renowned, Mariinsky Theatre stage. |
A Certain Light
© LWE blog: Life in CanLit 2018
My parents sacrificed time and their sense of belonging to bring me to Canada because the land offered more chances, and more possibilities for me to grow into someone more rich, prominent, and successful than themselves. In the end, I always knew that my parents would never allow me to pursue the arts. Still, I persisted. |
