Shin Yu Pai will be reading at Cascadia Magazine’s Evening of Words + Ideas at the Rendezvous Jewlebox Theater in Seattle at 7 pm, Friday Sept. 13. More details here.

an artist inserts ink under skin
shows you how to see

artistry in his craft
what’s discerned from studying

claws of a dragon,
finely drawn lines

in the form of waves

appearance of lotus
& cherry blossom in one

flowering gesture
asynchronous

*

when she sees eye to eye
with the mask of hannya

hanging on a wall, she sees
something she hadn’t noticed before —

an expression of sorrow;
reliving one of the few times,

her mother reasoned with her

what her parents told her in youth
to make her comply, take down

the poster of the black-haired singer
attired in oversized tee printed with

that same visage, a sad air, gone
by the time her grandfather arrived

for an extended stay; she adapted to
his fear of Japanese ghosts, didn’t ask,

about the odd look in her eyes, a guise
of wisdom, what marked the image

as the opposite of demonic, something
to be feared; her protective potential

*

in a stranger’s office

you dot

the pupil of the daruma,
black ink
absorbing into the papier-mâché doll,

dilates
to fill the void

half-sighted,
half-blind

*

she trembles in the shadow
of the solar eclipse, the feel

of totality: the temperature on her skin
goes cold by seventeen degrees,

the valley gone silent, an absence
of bird song around her

fearing she will go blind if
she takes away the protective sheath

she watches sun blotted out,
the sautered seam of light

crackling with the energy of electricity
her hairs stand on end

*

(a turning of the wheel)

there is no separation between
her and obliteration when she watches

a juvenile squid, logilo opalescens
expire in the weathered palm of

the retired smokejumper, a marine biologist
presiding over the death scraped

a plastic spoon across its soft body,
activating a rainbow of chromatophores,

ink flooding his grip

*

an animal died
in the making of this poem
cephalopods thrown into a plastic cooler,
the clear ziplocked bag of bodies
drawn to the Sound
in the hope of sex

the betrayal of
a promise to do no harm
tasting my unfaithfulness
while wanting to believe the biologist

who said all the right things:
when asked if the animal sensed pain

it has a highly developed nervous system
the group of adventurers peppered him

with questions dissecting
the anatomy of the animal

holding the creature’s gaze
“in its final death throes”

unprepared for the largeness of its eyes

*

the sight in the distance:

a band of anglers
bouncing fishing poles,

on the pier pulling their catch into
ten-pound buckets in a slow-motion

spray of light
gleaming drips cascading down

a canvas of night
my eyes dazzled by tears

the damp shadow of a squid
smeared across a sheet of Strathmore

*

the artist admits herself
to the hospital ward where

she contemplates infinity
for forty years:

in the room of the aftermath
of the obliteration of eternity

your heart stops beating
when the lights go black

a moment before, a knock

on the door brings you back
to the present

eyes gradually attuning
to a hundred glimmering lamplights

ascending flight of fire
lanterns at New Year’s

*

the day you leave that life behind—
artwalk revelers drunkenly pull

political prints beneath the warm lights
of a studio practice, a screen inked,

& re-inked with an image of a clenched fist —

after twenty years, opening the doors
of creativity for others — you turn away

walk into the icy night where you are
confronted steps away from your former life

with face after face of homeless men, women & children

projected on the side of an edifice
at one of the city’s beatest intersections

— portraits by a British photographer

neighbors from the Union Gospel Mission
towering three stories tall —made to gaze

at what you have feared—refusing the wage
that could put your family on the street; forsaking

money paid to you for what you gave up
in yourself to be a part of some other world,

remembering the margins
to which you always belonged

an ornamental carp leaping into waterfall

*

on Thanksgiving Day
she seeks out salmon spawning

at Carkeek Park, moving upstream
she finds their silver bodies at rest

in the shallows, in another
part of the creek, a fish

that didn’t make it, caught
in a tangle of branches

the plunk of water splashing
as another fights its way forward

a child sees this ceaseless cycle
as an augury of death

no, she says,
they are completing their lives

*

you take the eclipse inside yourself
the sheet of colored dots decorate

a white room, effacing every shred of
negative space, the colors the spectrum

of light, before an emotion emerges
the place of possibility where lotus

& sakura are born, to bloom together
upheld by your own sense of boundlessness

in the contours of hand-drawn waves
you pull your own story



Photo credits: enso caligraphy by Rinzai Zen master Bankei Yotako (1622-1693), public domain. Cuttlefish image by David Francis.