Witness Magazine

letter to a drowned poet

By
Poetry•Vol. 34 No. 2

by Jieyan Wang

Qu Yuan (340-278 BCE): an ancient Chinese poet,
drowned himself in the Miluo River
after the capture of his country’s capital.

in summer, your country falls & you’re left
with nothing but koi fish & sunlit insomnia
miluo: the quietest tributary, the off-cut you
cast yourself into, ripples expanding into rhymes

one day you wake & find yourself in the
kingdom of sons. the sons tell you instead of names
we count people by the rice grains we’ve swallowed. eat
as little as you can. your body is already defined
by water. a mother, not yours, calls i’m going to sing
for your slow breaths. reply yes even though there’s
no question mark. your body: it’s always bluing

begin with: i greet sorrow & its unopened flower bud
a boat, creaking with dreamlessness, cuts the current
end with: i slip away with my heart in between my fingers

 

 

Jieyan Wang is a first-year college student at Harvard University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Passages North, Baltimore Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other publications. She is also a reader for The Adroit Journal.

 

 

 

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Launched in Detroit in 1987, the magazine is best known for showcasing work that defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and exile. The issues “New Nature Writing,” “The Sixties,” “Sports in America,” and “The Best of Witness, 1987 – 2004” eventually appeared as university press anthologies. In 2007, Witness moved to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine publishes one print issue and one online issue a year, and increasingly seeks out work that contextualizes the American experience by highlighting issues of global concern.