"Untitled" by Jing Lin
Traveling Mercies by Tzynya Pinchback
“…and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying.”
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me”
Ain’t no way I left town without the pitch of her yell, the swell of her moan a river through my speakers
after you— squatting beside my car to place hand to fender in prayer the road, Denver to Nashville, rise
to greet me, eyes gray and glinting with tears— told me goodbye for the last time. After craft beers and
breakfast in lower downtown, you said, ain’t no way these gastropub biscuits taste better with seeded
black jam than the art of your scratch gravy – bleached flour over grease drippings scrambled in cast iron
until almost burnt black, before seeping in water and whisking together slowly, slowly like night rolling
into dawn, like the morning I awoke at your bedside, reclined and counting the seconds between your
exhalations. And ain’t no way in that lingering silence after the final rush of air left your lungs filling the
room with your exit, I didn’t bargain for time enough to pray you safe passage, my tongue a vinyl groove
repeating, call me the moment you get there.
--Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Between the World and Me”
Ain’t no way I left town without the pitch of her yell, the swell of her moan a river through my speakers
after you— squatting beside my car to place hand to fender in prayer the road, Denver to Nashville, rise
to greet me, eyes gray and glinting with tears— told me goodbye for the last time. After craft beers and
breakfast in lower downtown, you said, ain’t no way these gastropub biscuits taste better with seeded
black jam than the art of your scratch gravy – bleached flour over grease drippings scrambled in cast iron
until almost burnt black, before seeping in water and whisking together slowly, slowly like night rolling
into dawn, like the morning I awoke at your bedside, reclined and counting the seconds between your
exhalations. And ain’t no way in that lingering silence after the final rush of air left your lungs filling the
room with your exit, I didn’t bargain for time enough to pray you safe passage, my tongue a vinyl groove
repeating, call me the moment you get there.
Tzynya Pinchback’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Journal, the Aurorean, Midnight and Indigo, and Spectrum’s 17 Poets on 2017. She is author of the poetry chapbook, How to Make Pink Confetti (Dancing Girl Press, 2012), and blogs about surviving cancer and mermaids at www.tzynyapinchback.com.
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.
