Translated by Steve Bradbury
Her Perspire-y Left Hand was Semi-Colon-y (excerpt)
everyone needs a Sleeping Beauty and a pug
like a harbor needs a boat╱a hot spring a thousand-year-old egg the
prison warden issues handcuffs and locks
coral loiters in the place from whence it came waiting for the ocean to come back
her skin soaks into a kind of solar black╲the sky is looking-glass blue╱thatch screw pine a
deaf and dumb green
╲every one of the □ □╱could find themselves sluiced by the □ □ □ into a watermelon
frappe of a summer season
midday over╱the □ □ turn fertile fairly often
—
This selection comes from Ye Mimi’s chapbook His Days Go By the Way Her Years, available from Anomalous Press. Purchase your copy here!
Ye Mimi is a young Taiwanese poet and filmmaker. A graduate of the MFA Film Studio Program at the Art Institute of Chicago, she is the author of two volumes of poetry, most recently The More Car the More Far (Taipei: Garden City Publishers). Many of her poems are inspired by dreams, both by specific dreams she has had but also by the quirky ways in which dreams are cobbled together. Other poems seem to compose themselves when she is seized, for example, by a particular rhyme or alliteration that won’t let her go. Her best poems combine these sources of inspiration and tend to be written in a “white heat” over two or three days. She rarely talks about individual poems, but made an exception in the case of “A Moth Laid Its Eggs in My Armpit, and Then It Died,” when the English translation appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review a few years ago: “I really did have a dream that a moth laid its eggs in my armpit and died. It was just the sort of thing you’d want to call up all your friends and tell them about. That’s why I added all the stuff about phone booths. I’m more interested in playing language games than in communicating ideas or expressing my feelings, but in this case my feelings about telephone booths seem to have crept into the poem. I love a good phone booth and think it is sad how they are all disappearing now that everyone in Taiwan has a cell phone. I suppose you could say ‘Moth’ is a kind of elegy to that vanishing social space.”
Emily Capettini is a fiction writer originally from Batavia, IL. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and her fiction has appeared in places like Noctua Review and Stirring: A Literary Collection. Her critical work can be found in Feminisms in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose (McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012) and is upcoming in Neil Gaiman in the Twenty-First Century(McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015). She currently lives in Maryland.
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