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"Untitled" by Jing Lin

Accumulation by Molly Sutton Kiefer

She wakes to her children, who
dress themselves on their own now, excavating

the layers of quilts. They are asking
the smart speakers how to say

words in other languages from the cave
between her calves: mama and snow

and outside. Her nightgown is rucked
around her thighs and they patter

against the fabric, her legs now
tent poles and the night is starless

and it is endless. Outside is a plurality
of snow. It comes down as if

it’s forgotten it can rest too, beneath
the bellows of breath, the great lungs

​the atmosphere has become.

Molly Sutton Kiefer is the author of the full-length lyric essay Nestuary (Ricochet Editions). She has published three poetry chapbooks, and has work in Orion, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, The Rumpus, Tupelo Quarterly, Fiddlehead Review, Ecotone, South Dakota Review, and The Collagist, among others. She is publisher at Tinderbox Editions and founder of Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She lives in Minnesota with her family where she teaches.

 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.
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