~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Jianqing Zheng

Seeing the Shadows

              after Leo Touchet’s Monahans Sand Hills State Park Dunes #1734

Now a seagull

drifting on ripples

now an origami

with folded wings

now an iceberg

collapsing into ocean

now nothing

but hulking dunes

resembling

burial mounds

now shadows

changing shapes

with light

sliding across sands

into a long reptile

wriggling

into a silhouette

against seeing

Jianqing Zheng is author of The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville, 2023) and A Way of Looking (Silverfish Review P, 2021), editor of Conversations with Dana Gioia, and professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University. His ekphrastic poems have recently appeared in journals including Hawaii Pacific Review, Digging through the Fat, Arkansas Review, and Mississippi Review.