Featured Poem

• Visitation Of The Cartographers

  Jessica Yuan

  ---

  I clench my fist to draw
  a familiar country. The black sea
  is guarded and vast, rolling quickly
  to scatter its glare. Below,
  the metro crosses into itself
  like snakes, coiling
  strained muscles away
  from the center. In the center
  is a dark mound I crane my neck
  to shove fingers into.

  I am looking for the tower
  where I worked three summers ago
  and the wall which surrounds it
  and the precipice which guards it
  and the elevator which cradled me
  floating. Everyone stops
  and begs me to say what I remember,
  tell us where we are so we can turn
  our heads and continue to be here.

  I open my mouth to answer and leak
  a string of ink indicating
  the newly discovered source
  of our river, bitter and thick
  where the paper still lies blank.
  On its shores a group of shuttles
  crawl to an airport by the sea,
  crushing paving stones
  and elds of sun flowers, migrating
  out of memory like birds.

  Those were years
  none of us faced north,
  clutching our white stomachs
  like sh seen from below
  against watery cold sun,
  black hair from above
  in wet fluid blankets.
  And you traced what you traced.
  Now you would be recognized
  from ten thousand feet in the air,
  thin city grids laid out
  on burial grounds, the roaming ones
  mapped into unbeing,

  new regimes mapped
  into existence, paper shadows
  summoned by meticulous inking
  onto open fields, circumscribed
  and sliced even, then sold. Still
  the veins are squirming,
  pencil etching neat and thinly,
  water crumpling ledge,
  oil crawling through pipes,
  sewage meeting the alluvial gorge
  like a metro car expelling
  clean bodies between
  the clicking of wheels. 

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