"Untitled" by Jing Lin
Superstitions I Inherited From My Grandmother by Sade Andria Zabala
Don’t place money on the dining table.
Don’t brush your hair past 9 PM.
Don’t pay your debts in the evening or clean the house at night.
You’ll sweep away all the luck left in your sorry life.
Open the windows on New Year’s Eve to let good fortune in.
Don’t wear black. Wear polka dots.
Wear red to attract a mate like when I sliced
my palms for your grandfather on our wedding day.
Eat precisely 12 grapes in hopes each month’s new promise
won’t chew you down, spit you up.
Don’t trim your nails or cut your hair when the moon is out.
Do it in the morning so the men can see you.
Do it so they can be sure you pose no threat.
Jiggle coins in your pocket for the neighbors to hear
how emptiness sounds.
When coming home from a wake, be sure to rinse
the smell of the dead from your hair.
When a fork drops to the ground,
you will receive a female guest.
When a spoon drops to the ground,
you will receive a male guest.
When three people pose for a photo, the one in the middle
will be the first one to die.
It is up to you where you stand.
Don’t brush your hair past 9 PM.
Don’t pay your debts in the evening or clean the house at night.
You’ll sweep away all the luck left in your sorry life.
Open the windows on New Year’s Eve to let good fortune in.
Don’t wear black. Wear polka dots.
Wear red to attract a mate like when I sliced
my palms for your grandfather on our wedding day.
Eat precisely 12 grapes in hopes each month’s new promise
won’t chew you down, spit you up.
Don’t trim your nails or cut your hair when the moon is out.
Do it in the morning so the men can see you.
Do it so they can be sure you pose no threat.
Jiggle coins in your pocket for the neighbors to hear
how emptiness sounds.
When coming home from a wake, be sure to rinse
the smell of the dead from your hair.
When a fork drops to the ground,
you will receive a female guest.
When a spoon drops to the ground,
you will receive a male guest.
When three people pose for a photo, the one in the middle
will be the first one to die.
It is up to you where you stand.
Sade Andria Zabala is the Filipina author of poetry books WAR SONGS and Coffee & Cigarettes (Thought Catalog Books, 2016). Her writing has appeared on Words Dance, Persephone’s Daughters, cahoodaloodaling, and others. She lives in Denmark, and occasionally performs under the banner of NGO Danner.
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.
