July 14~ Yucheng Tao

Thanks for stopping by SHINE international poetry series, where today we're spotlighting Yucheng Tao, with his poems: "Dark Waiting" and "Blood and Ash" (previously published by Ink Sweat & Tears).  Thank you, Yucheng, for sharing your work with us once again! 

Dark Waiting

chains bind us tight in a desert of green vines.
green liquid slips in liquid darkness.
if we ride a spaceship upward,
we become waxen statues, congealed like jelly,
trapped in place, in the desiccation of time,
our brains devoured by bio-chips;
when they return from afar, seated in UFOs,
we remain technological guinea pigs,
is this our fate,
gliding daily through the iPhone-lit city?
perhaps the UFOs are our past yet to come.
in times without technology,
what are the images hanging in churches?
what binds us more; the vines or their whips?
trying to escape, but we cannot,
sucked into their gaping maws, swallowed by outsiders,
into the dark of a huge body; blue man-eating flowers emit
​a strange smell to us, like our news
leading us to seek everything through lies.
is this another paradise rearranged,
or just a forgotten history
where our ancestors turn their guns
into flowers that devour the blood of the Indians?
the dreadful scent of blooms lets us see God in dreams.
waiting for the rescuers of the interstellar alliance --
are these saviors, or more colonists?

​afterward, we see green vines again.
Eden lurks in our souls, rising like shadows of insects;
are our heart’s spells fulfilled by our own desire?
do we return to a prehistoric, unpolluted land?
or do we wait once more for another species’ colonization,
or do men enter the eternal cycle of global history,
another flood yet to come? 

Blood and Ash

​But look here, I turned my head
and discovered the Denver Museum
waiting,
a ghost that stood out in my sight,
telling me that their land was spring--
grass above flowers.
Today, they lay in an Indian exhibition,
silent；
Their faces were a sentence:
to strip them of survival
was as simple as pulling out corn.
The natives of the Arapaho
like me, watched how blood spread,
crossing
from the past into the present,
toward some corner of the world
where an unjust war burned,
buried under black moonlight
by fire.
Their bones could not be read,
as their remains were covered
under the ash of death,
silent,
floating like a ghost.
Denver’s rain is absent,
but rocks are red, like their blood.
The people of the city forget
as quickly as fish,
and sleep as deeply as rocks.

Yucheng Tao is a Chinese poet and the editor of The Argyle Literary Magazine. He serves as a reader for Palette. His work has appeared in Strange Horizons, White Wall Review, Wild Court, Ink Sweat & Tears, NonBinary Review and is forthcoming in Black Fox, StarLine*, I-70 Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. He has twice received an honorary award from the Dark Poet Club Contest.

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