untitled

-on When We Two Parted

susana takes

her leave. there is a grim moment

of notice; storage, apartments,

celebratory wines. nothing stops,

nothing knows how, even memorials

stand cringing at their own pretence.

we are people without gravity, cannot

fill occasion with words have no

place to stand in no ceremony

to summon things happen

merely

the contented spend

whorls of surfeited sorrow

on her; the peripatetic pounce on

new plans, ogle itineraries,

bring themselves this once more to

believe in the meaning of

travel of place of shifting

to frantically revisit reacquire exchange

gossip and tidbits of misheard

trivia, the debris of history

of unreal empires in places

undone

the maudlin recount

every parting to themselves

every ungrasping every

fearfulness of finality since the first

tang poet was dispatched to

barbarian posts, they are of

those who miserously exult

whose climaxes are in welters

and washes of sorrow

and for all: it is, it must be

patterned on foibles of

attachments imagined

and built on the assumption

of a present protracted

eternal and lost

but moments

mercifully pass : we are

overgrown

the present

JS

Untitled

-on transportation

of course even just passing
through or on is travel,
and the drift as criminal as the drive;
meanwhile the constant
disjunctions of culture and
nonsense of race and tantalus
of language and faint pines
or palms make remnants
of shadows on plates of
impression; all this is mere
constitution. so ooze or
exude or bind it. live in departing
getting there harbours
piers airports station. the baroque
detritus of mind is always preparing
universal perpetual motion; no one
and nothing stays put. even the lives of
the never-changing are set
against the rolling eye, glimpsed
as we went past, seeming
to move in the abrasive drag the
gasping rush the sick list and tip the engines of
lucre and fear and wonder and
hope. and in attempting
the observation of difference,
risible in our commonality and our commonness,
desire to provoke that
greedy self-mockery which
demands redemptive the
ability to see in our cruelties
and magnanimities always
like a deep flat drone our
sweet and brutal and mutual dumbness.
yes we talk but not with
yes we move but not on
so that every step pas-de-deux
or circling sally seems to occur
at the pole, where all directions
are meaningless, and the primary
concern is where to get warmth.
write me if you discover
where to get warmth.

JS

Author Biography

Josh Stenberg’s fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in Asia Literary Review (HK), Kartika Review (USA), Pograniczcza(Poland), Tissages/Weavings (Canada) and Corrego (Brazil). His translations of Chinese fiction and theatre have appeared in Kyoto Journal, Copper Nickel, Renditions and in two volumes, Madwoman on the Bridge (2008, Black Swan) and Tattoo (2010, MerwinAsia). Born in Canada, he teaches at Nanjing Normal University and conducts research at the Jiangsu Kun Opera Company.