"Untitled" by Jing Lin
Two poems by Bailey Cohen
Please, Mother:
don’t say
she died. Say she vanished
from her bed
with a smile, snapping
her fingers
and evaporating
into ash. That she re-formed,
with skin, clean
as summer
on an island
& liked it so much she had to stay.
Tell me how
when she began to think
of how she was going to survive
& of how there are those that say
that she may not be woman enough
she tore
the head
off a hornet’s
delightfully
fuzzed body
with only her
two front teeth
& chewed.
she died. Say she vanished
from her bed
with a smile, snapping
her fingers
and evaporating
into ash. That she re-formed,
with skin, clean
as summer
on an island
& liked it so much she had to stay.
Tell me how
when she began to think
of how she was going to survive
& of how there are those that say
that she may not be woman enough
she tore
the head
off a hornet’s
delightfully
fuzzed body
with only her
two front teeth
& chewed.
Paper Cups
i.
In the thick air coiled around your body
like a wedding ring, I inhaled you
tragically. Our sweat evaporated
into the humidity. We did this after a night together
not touching. Around 4 a.m. I woke & asked
you for water. You gave it to me
& I was repaying.
i.
It was like rain,
how my mother told me
that when she was young
she remembered it beginning
to drizzle in the front yard
of her house in Riobamba,
and yet the grass was still dry
in the back. I could take either the fire
escape or the elevator, but if I took
the elevator I wouldn’t be able to see
you. This could be either a good thing
or not. Planting with her
as a child, I always drowned
the chrysanthemums, and this is how you
& I used to love each other. You said
get better & I have been
trying ever since.
i.
I am floating and it is lovely
up here the view is fantastic I can see
all the way from your heart to mine
you’re so pretty darling my favorite
thing about you is your ribcage
and how you interlaced it
with my fingers as gently as you could
we did good darling damn good
i.
In empty nightfall, we sat
at the table. You fed me
honey and custard. Outside,
the bitter lightning collapsed
under the gravity of rapture
and I think of dancing in the rain
to escape all this sweetness.
You have never known something
so heavy and bright as this.
To reach for low-hanging fruit
& keep reaching. To drift through
burlesque orchard & then,
more. You said look past the storm.
You said that’s all it would take.
Today, I familiarize myself with
the sweetness of my own skin.
I walk to stand under the water & know
it is water. Tomorrow, I will get out
of bed. I will drink grapefruit
-flavored tea from paper cups.
In the thick air coiled around your body
like a wedding ring, I inhaled you
tragically. Our sweat evaporated
into the humidity. We did this after a night together
not touching. Around 4 a.m. I woke & asked
you for water. You gave it to me
& I was repaying.
i.
It was like rain,
how my mother told me
that when she was young
she remembered it beginning
to drizzle in the front yard
of her house in Riobamba,
and yet the grass was still dry
in the back. I could take either the fire
escape or the elevator, but if I took
the elevator I wouldn’t be able to see
you. This could be either a good thing
or not. Planting with her
as a child, I always drowned
the chrysanthemums, and this is how you
& I used to love each other. You said
get better & I have been
trying ever since.
i.
I am floating and it is lovely
up here the view is fantastic I can see
all the way from your heart to mine
you’re so pretty darling my favorite
thing about you is your ribcage
and how you interlaced it
with my fingers as gently as you could
we did good darling damn good
i.
In empty nightfall, we sat
at the table. You fed me
honey and custard. Outside,
the bitter lightning collapsed
under the gravity of rapture
and I think of dancing in the rain
to escape all this sweetness.
You have never known something
so heavy and bright as this.
To reach for low-hanging fruit
& keep reaching. To drift through
burlesque orchard & then,
more. You said look past the storm.
You said that’s all it would take.
Today, I familiarize myself with
the sweetness of my own skin.
I walk to stand under the water & know
it is water. Tomorrow, I will get out
of bed. I will drink grapefruit
-flavored tea from paper cups.
Bailey Cohen is a queer Ecuadorian-American poet studying English and Politics at New York University. A finalist for the 2018 Boulevard Contest for Emerging Poets and the runner-up for the 2018 RR Laux / Millar Prize, he serves as a contributing writer for Frontier Poetry and the editor of Alegrarse: A Journal of Close Readings. He has received a Best of the Net nomination and has poems in or forthcoming from [PANK], Boulevard, Raleigh Review, Boiler Journal, The Penn Review, The Shallow Ends, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and more. He loves everyone Latinx.
In her mysterious monochromatic photographs, Jing Lin reconstructs a familiar world that no one has been to. Her background in motion pictures informs her current work. As a graduate photography student at Academy of Art University, she worked with multiple darkroom techniques in traditional and alternative printing processes. She blurs the edge between photography and painting through the use of experimental processes. Solitary, Jing’s most recent body of work, portrays a nonexistent place to examine the theme of self-confinement. Constantly, she explores photography with these questions in mind: What did I see? What did I not see? www.jinglinphotography.com/
Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA.
Chinese, b. 1993, Chengdu, China, based in San Francisco, USA.
