Bilingual Readings of Autumn '24 Issue

5.(无题) - 莹


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translated by PLS


I’ve always been a bit scared of cats. Esmeralda strokes the stray cat in her arms, smirking at me. Her current movement, I think, is like a riddle for a single word verb. The answer, is “tuck”. Standing in the shadow of the outline of a flood emergency command unit, I wanted to give her an indulgent smile, but it may just look like embarrassment. I wanted to tell E about the things I can not accomplish: the world stores suspense in a bridge, as if locking the spring with uranium, sometimes reduced into self entertainment as a result of not receiving employment injury insurance. I imitate the surface of lakes, solving unfamiliar algebra with bridges, as willows hand over the unpredictable power, releasing sighs of labour outside the system. It’s the fourteenth time the spring rain attempts to lurk in the night with Du Fu, yet the latter’s poetry manifests, that rain is also endlessly coding Du Fu, and night is chosen as a preferred complier, rain steps into a chaos un-intermittently, like the rain from when the Tang dynasty started to decline, predicting the answer to Esmeralda’s riddle, interpreting “tuck” in a hieroglyphic way, as a salutation for herself, though these riddles coughed out by Du Fu with the pains of a caged beast when he was minstreling about the universe, bide as a sidekick at the joints of one after another riddles, muddleheaded and stubborn. 



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Bilingual Readings of Autumn '24 IssueBy Poetry Lab Shanghai