~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Peihe Feng

love poem for a dead political prisoner

Your slow-motion smile in monochrome: 1925

an overcast afternoon in Canton. A moment

resurrected by the zeitgeist stood

as a warning sign & the only mourner

on a sacrificial rite where you were dressed

in all white, posing as a figurine of snow

in front of a city that snows once-a-century

sharp. There were talks about the jade-boned

& ice-fleshed goddess wading the water

and turning up disfigured. In the photo your face

is as blurry as a premature mural; downcast eyes

poring over the raindrop stains that turned copper

on your skin; the bullet seeded in your spine

sprouted into a skeletal machine

keeping you alive as an unfinished statuette

placed above the pedestal of a crumbling country.

There is this footage of you talking, walking

among the evolving shadow of faces (history

anonymizes with an identical numbness), gazing

over the camera, an extinct language trembling on your lips –

You were in agony and I exit the page to replay your funeral

filmed by some of the earliest cameras in this country, where

your lead-white smile hangs like a cold sun beside the flag.

I fantasized about going back to stop you

in what ways I can: talk to you, both hands

groping for the wind streaming inside your neck; lead

with wide-open unseeing eyes the two of us

to sleepwalk out of this landscape of oblivion and pain.

Peihe Feng is a student from Guangzhou, China. She has published a prose collection in Chinese, while her English poems are published or forthcoming in The Basilisk Tree, Thimble, Roanoke Review, and elsewhere. She gardens on her balcony with her cat.