"Untitled" by Jing Lin
What the World Won't Show Us by Romeo Oriogun
to my mother without the baby
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Of the many people singing tonight, you are the loneliest, although you buried a child and hid a pig’s skin beside your bed, something to remind you of a baby’s warmth. Behind the house a bird sings from a guava tree and here again is the language of grief, every song is a door calling us to the past and what gives when our voice can’t hold a name? Every gospel speaks of love as clay opening the eye of darkness, but love is also you, rubbing clay on your skin to trap a name. Tonight, you bit into desire to hide your pain and called the process gifting a lover a body. Mother, what doesn’t share of our grief is not of us. The horse hooves hitting the ground are questions to the past, a means of breaking the earth into a room to see the cup of pomade sitting on the chair, a hot comb passing through bristled hair, a child’s mouth open slightly as if from it the world’s rivers begin. Even in this moment, holy is the body ready to hit the grave, holy are hands softening the skin for a satin gown, holy are the wings holding back the sun, holy is a brother holding the shadow of another brother. Mother, what is the child’s name? We can’t be free from what is without name. This I know is what you seek in every lover. In the dark, the night was once quiet, so was I, so was the child crying across the field.
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Romeo Oriogun is the author of The Origin of Butterflies, selected by Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Connotation Press and Brittle Paper. He was the 2017 winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, a fellow of the Ebedi International Writers Residency and currently A Visiting Poet at Harvard University.
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.
