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Trepidation
One day a man came to me
He said I heard you have a lot of trepidation
I said you were right
He said can you show me
I pulled out a trepidation from my blouse pocket
He caught it
I pulled out another
And another
His hands could not carry more
Ok. Ok. That is enough.
I will return all to you.
He turned back
Clapped his hands
Not wanting to keep a little crumb
I saw he walked to a faraway place
To the crowd to say
She did not cheat us
She really has many trepidations
She put them all
Into the pockets of her blouse
Polishing Photos
Sent retouched photos
To my father
His feedback
Let me realize that
Melancholy and exhaustion
Cannot be polished away
Intestine
I entered the room with a man
About to have sex. Several women came. One of them was probably
A doctor. Started to interpret men’s sexual organs.
A mass
Spread in an iron basin. Complex. All
Looked with wide open eyes.
Inside was something thin and long. Like intestine. All
Said impossible.
Turned and poked in the basin. Actually, it was mixed with
A fish’s viscera. Taken away.
Lover
Her lover came
To live
With
Her/her husband/her child
On the second floor
Stayed still for long
Like an invisible elephant
Observed how
Her/her husband/her child
Lived together
Sometimes
Draped in a big fluffy blanket
She chased her child running upstairs
Oh
Her child was hard to deal with
Her husband probably not much better
After a while her lover came downstairs
Sat in a wheelchair
She went to push
Was forcibly displaced by her husband
Who spun her lover like a swirl of gust
Label
A man walked by the house
I looked down from the window on second floor to see
Whether the tiny yellow fluttering about his coat
Was a label
Wanted to catch a person who forgot to tear off the label
Before going out
Liu xingli was born in Jingzhou, Hubei, China and moved to Stockholm, Sweden in 2012. The poems she’s submitting were first written in Chinese and then translated to English by herself. Her poems have been published by Expat Press, whose editor-in-chief thought they were stark and evocative. She has had several short stories published in print in China and published about 45 poems in Chinese digital poetry journals. A gifted Chinese poet has said that “Xingli is a quiet observer and hunter behind the camera. She is keen to avoid viewpoints and lyricism in her poems. Her poems match Edward Hopper’s paintings peerlessly.”