Winter Is A Difficult Hospital
i.
After the winter holidays, there lies a hidden year.
Time doubles for reality.
Keep yourself busy in the meanwhile.
Activities such as ping pong exist —
so we can throw rocks at each other, legally.
The word lunch must be relearned.
The sound of the word lunch has been broken.
The goal of this is to forget the world outside.
At all cost, it must be allowed
that life will continue without you.
Rejoice, the days will grow longer now.
Sunlight is different
than light itself.
ii.
Dawn breaks —
my dead cigarettes are found cross-dressing
in a stone pot with the violets.
I am appalled by how much they look like teeth.
They look like my teeth.
I wash my hands seven times and I smell empty again.
Against two curtains —
my shape makes a moon in the early day.
Tomorrow, the violets triumph,
and wait for more tribute.
iii.
The proof that things have gotten better —
is that nothing is the same.
I pass by a charcoal etching
of an old windmill in Norway.
Yet I am not ready to cry,
because it has not been decided who I will miss.
Listen to the poet read “Winter Is A Difficult Hospital”
Half Hexagonal World
i.
If a piano can be played on a computer,
which unit is the instrument?
Where there is no person, there are no rules.
Sometimes there is no person, and there are still rules.
What is online is not exactly new.
The internet is an iteration of the first dimension.
ii.
What is the aperture of a sound?
Sometimes we hear a song
that someone else wrote,
but wish anyways that we never came up with it.
The half hexagonal world is a world unfinished.
It is challenging a final resolution. Somewhere, a god
paints symbols into the wind and calls it text.
iii.
A mirror is waiting to be reversed.
After the school-day,
a child remembers having the body of an old man.
He quietly searches the words “nude,” for images.
Then, “nipples.” Then finally, “torso.”
A picture of a headless corpse flashes before his eyes,
and he becomes vegetarian for a year.
iv.
A Matisse painting is stuck
in a gallery with no lights. It flashes green
with naked dancers. Waiting for him, ready to heal
and be healed — itself.
v.
Someone has requested Sibelius to be recorded into a device.
In a concert hall, the orchestra is tuning their strings.
The conductor hears a violinist complaining,
and shouts out above the music, speak up.
This is heard in the playback.
vi.
In 1952, five men watch another soldier
dance naked on a Nha Trang beachfront
before he falls onto the sand, laughing.
We smell like a dice tonight.
Only gravity can wash this away.
Listen to the poet read “Half Hexagonal World”
Ultimate Sun Cell
i.
I’m getting older each day, but better
to say, my shadow grows every year.
Maybe I’m losing my features, and maybe I never needed them.
Slowly, this is the way I grow thirty feet tall.
Witness, I am headed to the sun.
I try to listen to others if I go too far.
Someone is having nightmares of me leaping
over a dark river. To listen to your own dreams is a matter of dignity,
but to listen to another’s – is prophecy.
We rarely name our star boys.
So what is the body made from fire,
and the body made from sunlight?
ii.
Maybe there was no way for Daedalus to see his son’s
face, wind-struck, as the figure fell. The light flourishing
from above, as Icarus turned his shoulder inward.
Only the wings, and their fickle bonds,
melt into the sky, like rain falling upwards.
Only his hair is visible, the only part moving, and his hand
frozen and reaching still for light.
Perhaps he was screaming. I think
not though, it was more likely
that he was grinning, with his eyes and mouth
shut. Icarus finished his adventure
five seconds before he died.
This is a human’s ideal ending.
iii.
One must imagine Icarus happy.
So, there is no need to carry me home.
I’m evolving, and maybe this is the future
of all heartbreak, to drop life back up to the sky?
Listen to the poet read “Ultimate Sun Cell”
Haolun Xu was born in Nanning, China. He immigrated to the United States in 1999 as a child. He was raised in central New Jersey and recently graduated from Rutgers University. His writing has appeared in or soon in Witness, Ruminate, New Ohio Review, The Florida Review, and more. His chapbook, Ultimate Sun Cell, is forthcoming with New Delta Review.