Echo I: What The First Woman Swallowed
Shredding his sunlit vestments,
Priest’s weight silenced the equal woman.
Undisciplined eyes sheathe me—
a fury, charred on his pristine swords.
Deep down the abyss among nights,
I wrench my self-portrait—
Straddling unfamiliar blades,
the realm sears my throat,
and my lungs blister right to left.
My unbuttoned mouth swallows fuses
from the organs of men—
muffled, skinned, teeth dyed;
perished, rising, fangs lit.
Beneath Damoclean pikes—
each one signifying revenge.
A disobedient woman,
unworthy of tender touch—
her infant-bloom still sealed
beneath Rousseau’s tears.
They do not know this tiger-guiding woman.
Fiercer than wolves through salt water,
my eyes—two felines tarring raw light—
He sees the afterbirth
at the end of his lecture
as I clutch my hip-round of thoughts.
Offering me half the sky
after razing the one
I now return to Lord.
Thighs vise as we roar
through a venomous climax.
Swords lower as the rain strikes
through the force of May.
Thunder slips me from the virgin world.
I swallow as if I never swallowed a man.
You stand among storms —more effigial than any god.
Here, goblets rise at the cross reversed.
Each wrist rises, declaring
a wine coil bled from your heart,
threading straight into my rib.
Ha!
Spring wind ascends,
—splitting me widely awake.
A gluttony resurrects,
a virgin undone
and again—
REMADE.
Echo II: Frankenstein’s spring
Ice shatters its wintry silence.
Swarthy hands—once stitched—
motor themselves to sight,
raving by March’s final breath
toward April’s promise.
Swallows slice returning paths
through the thawing sky.
Green yawns from Earth’s dark mouth,
my body mirroring her restoration:
Spring’s underbelly upturned,
while an amber glow satiates
the polar bear’s hunger.
In fur that held December’s darkness,
sunlight reflects the sky’s refusal of night.
Illumination penetrates like truth:
hillside and mosses couple
among wetting rocks;
frogs mount their hunts across waters freed from ice.
But even in renewal, Death persists:
monarch butterfly wings tweezed mid-flutter,
the deer’s neck snapped in wolf’s jaws,
beggar’s rocking hands trampled in Mayfair,
daffodils unfurling between crushed bones and gold.
While jungle creeds drum through survival’s hierarchy,
labours’ palms rekindle the drowned sky.
Have we forgotten the passion Winter set ablaze?
My body once dedicated
as Christmas Solstice,
now binds Betelgeuse
to Venus
across the horizon’s clearing dome.
Did we crown the butcher and betray the jingled vows?
Did we kneel like the red star towards love
when Santa vanished in the hearth?
Swells from a distance—starmounds quicken in unrest—rise
through paint-oil gleam, inciting
sparks from Earth’s own burning door.
How sorrowful to forget the constellation’s inferno
that trudged through a vast night,
their beckoning thin as woman’s sigh when newborn tears
press against the womb that once sheltered.
Beneath black palls, Fear crawls:
yet glazed eyes
pump first blood through roots—
juvenile Frankenstein awakening.
We ask for nothing better than a spadix-like thrust
from corpse flower’s wound,
slicing
through the tendon that no longer feels.
Dawn undresses seed from shell,
and Earth unwinds her clock—
not a second more, not a day less.
Water returns to water.
In the bluing luminescence, faces buried
by last season’s sickle shield my sleet-rent mouth
while I await youthful lips beneath yellowed marshland—
breathing, at last, the fresh world April promised
and I…
reel alone.
Echo III: On the shores we lived
In woods where history hangs itself,
laments are sung for the chased skulls—
each a foreign season’s anthem,
even as they were broken in two themselves.
The collapsed libraries and lovers’ bridge
gutted the Sava River—
the mirror of Sarajevo’s wounds.1
How far does hunger drive flesh across borders?
Waves return wearing feathers of the condemned.
Seagull wings command tides that swallowed my first home.
I, ransacked, kneel while only the dead giggle at their release;
torch half-bare against icons gone cold in the blitz
while the spring winds lord over votive racks,
counterfeiting peace
that was never mine nor yours.
Steamboat hulls and exposed fish ribs
testify against
empires of deception, splitting history’s amnesia awake.
I stand shrouded in that shiver that follows bombardment—
water carrying us all, merciless as governments,
toward shores that reject our names.
Certainty arrives unwelcome as midnight deportation—
neck of movements snapped by yellow boundaries,
the twilight of our homeland forced down our tongues.
They promised us a land of honey and milk;
as diplomas vanish at customs,
and CVs rot in mailboxes.
They seduced us with wages in car wash’s suds,
rockstar’s fingerprints orphaned
from guitar chords and drum’s lambskin.
They wheedled away our rights to leave from contracts,
dreams of dancers and singers turned wannabes
beneath Soho’s red lights.
Tiny, tiny…, far away from the wonderland
of bow-tied gentlemen and English tea.
Faint… faint… breathing small
and counting the untidy tips
in the folds of whipped breasts.
The beggar’s hands,
cauterized
by childhood’s exploding fuse,
deafened us from omens whistling
through bullet casings.
Dozens of hatchlings canned in shells
watch mothers wade into the machine-gunned distance.
Their children—jagged languages—
face the Black Sea’s cargoes
salivated by traffickers of breath and skins.
They whisper, thin as rationed bread:
“In March, swallows will carve us
into petitions on camera-ready banners.
In May, peace doves will harvest
our skulls
for museum’s sorrow.
When we all lie alone
beneath this river’s militarized belt,
our blood will finally transmute into moribund blue—
connecting soils of countless unremembered cities
beneath a single bank that unites
all our scattered bones.”
Echo IV: Knotting Hands Under the Red Sky
Red rages rupture—a birth scream with no mother—
existence a slit throat under seagulls hovering
like scalp-white mourners.
Hair and fire snarl—
crooning ghoulish requiem through the gust’s sudden tug.
Speech drowns in its own soliloquy:
blackened ribbons crystallize on the survivor’s cheeks.
Bones in gloves, bluing fists,
nails preening through handcuff rust.
The hands know what the mouth won’t.
Stone lions’ neck serrated by two million fingers’ knots.
This is how I heave myself out:
Change this. Change that. Don’t look back—
or it drags you down, ankle-first,
into the gullet of the shuckled shore:
Beating death on their own breasts,
three borders sing in C minor
under a mountain’s whole rest.2
2 Whole Rest: In musical notation, a whole rest is a silence lasting the duration of an entire measure. It is visually represented as a small rectangle hanging from the second line of the staff. In poetic terms, it can suggest a full pause—a complete suspension of sound, breath, or motion.
Echo V: Red Beacons
Waves shudder—flee from shore’s dominion.
Salt voices whine when I ride the mirror of my reflection.
Night’s sharp anchor holds while fire ruffles water;
Dreams sob crimson through swamps of endless vision.
Across my untidy skin, mothers’ breasts were steadfast—
Flanking a silver of silence with their immovable tenets.
The feelings elders lack, carried forward by a whirlwind
And lording about lands; the barren eternity
That draws back the sky—afraid of its cadence.
Solstices wheel wild on butterfly wings! A kaleidoscope
Writhed in greenhouse glass, while the pale moon—hermit
Drained in dust—watches red beacons spin:
Too hot for earth, they fall, bleeding a colour of thunderous years
Into my waiting veins—
Pulse rising from the inner sea; shanks thinning beneath pants.
How many times has mortal clay rotted in terrible silence?
Passion greets desolate solitude like mirror-faces
On their nocturnal tasks—watching animals relish
Their breath and death at whistles before storms.
Eye to eye, the borders churn through waves—no rest in light or wind!
Red beacons burn eternal; moving water whispers to graying ears:
“There you are on the lighthouse—small hands, small reach,
against what sky and sea have always been.”
But this flesh-cage I consecrate, blazing, until mountains
Bow their lava crowns to the same brief fire.
Let the cosmos witness the dusk and dawn I kindle
That make all exiles sacred, equal and glad
In the wonderful Divine:
All flesh a temple, all darkness a doorway
To light that owes no century—knows no time.
Echo VI: Fell in love with the alpha wolf
Who would have known—a man’s violence, the strike from the love of your life,
Could spare the woman’s need for the presence of a proper shaman,
the bells and sages from the nature’s rogue, to enter into a trance.
The fire the matriarch refused to teach coming not from distrust,
But a glimpse she saw through: Another woman, mistook a wolf’s fangs in a deer’s throat,
A man’s fingers into a smuggler’s eyes, and a gun raised on all the unfairness’s skull—
As her fire because he turned and whispered: here, their apologies and flesh are your feast.
What about the law of the world that protects millions of both the good and the damned?
What about the order of yourself that once brought you to reclaim all the fairness?
Gone. You became the exhausted Prometheus who put hope on the hawk and Zeus
Who were supposed to prey on his liver and soul.
But— How the hell did you end up here?
You have seen the ugly face of the world at an age too tender
to even know it’s beautiful.
Parents wrapped you in burlap and sold you to the Bluebeards—
for not being a son.
The policewoman who saved you, sent you to sanctuary,
but never once showed her face—never once anchored who you are.
Then, hand to hand. From home to home.
Foster parents visiting your room, shaking their heads:
“We are not responsible for her trauma.”
You saw love in the steam rose through rice—a wife made for her husband
without his thank you, without his eyes lifting from his phone.
A husband came home carrying too much alcohol, too many cigarettes,
but praised for not carrying another woman’s perfume on his collar.
The Zhongkao teacher cracked your stepsister’s canvas in half for sleeping in math class.3
And you understood: this is what love should look like.
Women bleed. Men feed.
Friends—called distractions before even being made.
Boys—entitled to belittle you until you had to throw a dagger at their skulls.
Is that a lesson they teach? A decree to stop you from finding yourself?
Among all the predators in life, you were left with no choice
but to love the king of them all.
By the moment he liberated you through palms that lifted your hips—
blood bled from others poured into your mouth like communion wine.
But the tingles you felt in your hips—were not electricity.
The rumble from his mouth was thunder before the lightning struck.
Still you clung to the bruised color of the sky—so desperately.
For the luck you had—swirling Baileys he bought in his bedroom,
watching rain hammer the windows like fists.
Shivering at his sublime. His rage. The necks he snapped unashamedly—
in front of you and for you, like gifts.
3 Zhongkao is China’s high school entrance exam, a nationwide academic test taken by students at the end of middle school to determine placement in secondary education. It is intensely competitive and often shapes a student’s future trajectory.
And his plea for love made you almost forget his belt was meant to strike you—
until his hand landed on your throat, his belt on the shoulder
he once fed his own blood to like a sacrament.
You were once again forced to confront all the pieces
you evaded before meeting him.
In a system that never asked you to heal.
Never spared punishment when you tried to.
And made you fall in love the moment a man appeared
to take care of your evasion.
Because that’s the only option you are given—
so long as it doesn’t compromise their kingdom.
So that the fire of your own—won’t burn their empire down.
Author’s note
I execute literary devices in two very different classrooms.
The first was Mandarin, where meaning ripples under the surface and readers are trusted to swim toward it themselves. Poetry was not encouraged there—our exam rooms preferred formulas to metaphors—so a poem had to live in the margins of notebooks, in whispers after lights-out.
The second classroom was English, which I entered at eighteen when I left China for London. English came with its own gatekeepers: libraries full of classics, critics ready to decide what counted as “literature,” quick to stop at the first layer of a line. Between those
two worlds I have spent years running— from place to place, from one set of rules to another—looking for a page wide enough to hold both silences and storms.
If these six Echoes feel restless, that is why.
Akhmatova’s sorrow and Lermontov’s thunder travel with me. From Akhmatova I borrowed restraint: her way of hiding whole seas of grief inside a single tide-line. From Lermontov I borrowed motion: the urge to pace a frontier even while the sky is cracking open. Their voices taught me that a poem can stand absolutely still and still feel like a journey, that it can whisper and still shake stone.
You will meet that balance in Echo I, where the first woman does not fall but walks away; in Echo III, where a war-scarred river refuses every border drawn across it; and in Echo IV, where a human chain of protest hums with contained fire. Even the red beacon of Echo V
carries both lessons: it burns in place, yet its light travels farther than any fleeing ship.
Nature appears as a teacher too. An English Dot rabbit, a red signal light on the sea, the quiet orbit of a whole rest in music—all remind me that endurance can be tender, that flight can be faithful, and that silence is often the strongest note.
So these poems speak in two tongues at once. They keep the Mandarin habit of suggestion—letting objects do the feeling—and they lean into the English hunger for direct address. Between them, I hope, stretches a common ground where a reader may pause, listen,
and choose their own depths.
Thank you for sharing the path. If the poems leave you with a sense of movement held inside stillness, of fire banked beneath calm, then Akhmatova, Lermontov, and every hurried mile between languages have done their work.
1 Refers to the Siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996), the longest siege in modern history during the Bosnian War, marked by relentless shelling, sniper attacks, and civilian suffering.
