Tag Archives: video poems

Bai Juyi, trans. Jaime Robles

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Two Poems

Translated by Jaime Robles with Ma Chengyu; video by Jaime Robles

 

Bai Juyi (白居易; 772–846), courtesy name Letian (樂天), was a musician, poet, and politician during the mid-Tang dynasty. A successful politician who governed three states during his long career, he was known for an accessible, near vernacular style that was popular throughout medieval East Asia. He was a practitioner of Chan Buddhism. In 832, Bai Juyi repaired an unused part of the Xiangshan Monastery, about seven miles south of Luoyang. He then moved to this location, where he spent the last fourteen years of his life. While living there, he referred to himself as the “Hermit of Xiangshan.”
Jaime Robles is a writer and visual artist. Her artist’s books are housed at the University of California, Berkeley; Yale University; and the Oulipo Archive in Paris, among others. She has two collections published by Shearsman Books (UK), Anime Animus Anima and Hoard, and has been published by many journals, including Conjunctions, Black Sun Lit, New American Writing and Shearsman. On her Substack page, she publishes her thoughts on poetry, art, witches and girl troubadours.
Ma Chengyu studied in Europe and the United States. She currently teaches Chinese and studies guqin. She lives in Shenzhen, China.

Joanna Fuhrman

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Three Video Poems

Cardinal

As we veer through the leafy branches of a forest, I remember that my mother who is steering the car has been dead for more than a year and I can’t drive, and my father can’t drive and my grandmother — who even though she is dead is alive and in the car with us — can’t drive either. The car keeps going, through patches of bark and black rivers, over sap-filled gaps that smell of pine. Why are you worrying so much, the earth is a mouth that can lick you clean, says the voice of the trees, or is it the voice of my mother leaving my own mouth. When I grab the wheel, I become the red blur of a cardinal, skittering too fast for anyone but God to see. I don’t believe in God or any gods. As I fly past the shadows of my parents, above my parents and through their flickering outlines, I myself am a kind of god and am surprised how small my parents appear skidding through the forest’s mud. I try to remember that my mother is dead, but I am looking down at her and I can see her face twitching. I still see her cherry red cheeks, her eyes.

 

The Weekender

 

There is no Q train today
The B train never runs on weekends

The 2 train is suspended or in perpetual
suspense

The 3 train is running on the 2 line
but not the 2 line in New York,
the one mapped out in blue light
drawn in crayon on the topography
of a sleeping face

The M train has been replaced with a shot
by shot reshoot of the 1931 film M,
this time directed by Ron Howard

The J train is telling jokes about jazz

The D train is a metaphor for all dark thoughts
or it’s the last character in a password
an AI created and forgot to share with humanity

The R and N trains are trading places Freaky Friday style
The 5 train is giving the ghost of King Kong a high-five

The 4 train is forsaking the scent of nostalgia
for the aftertaste of futuristic rage

The S train is tracing the lines
on a naked god’s infinity snake tattoo

The 6 train is polishing its six-pack
The E train is lacing ecstasy with exhaust

The C train and the A train are rumored to have eloped
but are actually in a polyamorous relationship
with the Z

The 7 train is hoarding all the luck

The G train is discovering its G spot
The F train says F you
 

Self-Portrait as Cloud

 

I feel most myself.
when—like today—

all of the sky
is a single

undifferentiated
cloud

when ice particles
break grammar

into something
resembling space
 

Joanna Fuhrman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2024). Fuhrman’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2023, The Pushcart Prize anthology, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and The Slowdown podcast. She first published with Hanging Loose Press as a teenager and became a co-editor in 2022.

Joanna Fuhrman

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Poem with Missing Line

Did you mean to wake up with your nerves
dangling like sneakers from suburban trees?

Have you ever walked inside a mattress and found
a queen-sized bed frame inside? Do you enjoy igniting

brick houses with your eyebrows? Do you recognize
the kind of silence where everyone looks naked

even when they are wearing a floor length
coverup or a burkini? Have you ever shaken hands

with the bodhisattva of bitterness? Did his hand
feel like the skin of a pomegranate? Or its seeds?

Are you able to eat these days? Are you able
to stop eating? If we sing the Star-Spangled Banner

backwards while watching the Warriors, does
Coney Island become our new national capital?

Did you mean to punch me in the smoked kipper?
The wardrobe? The nightingale? Do you prefer kale chips

or woodchippers? Is your ceramic frog floatable?
How many more punches until we can untether

the fireflies? Do you enjoy the way I dangle
my earlobe in your microwaved Bolognese?

If so, when will you start loving me with a little
less than 1000 percent of that wound?
 

In the Matrix Starring Nicolas Cage

Neo is a piss-ass drunk, and it doesn’t matter if alcohol is only an idea. Meaning detaches from language and flies in slow motion like a shampoo commercial. The absent women shift behind the curtains, a mother’s face camouflaged by a William Morris floral, a sister’s breath hidden by the smell of an off-season fireplace. The 21st century is riding a bloodshot Ferrari into the mouth of climate change, and it needs pure vodka to make it okay. Nic is naked all the time. Even naked, he sweats through his clothes. Even when he’s fully dressed his dick swings unsheathed. You try lassoing the sky’s panopticon with only a goddamned body part. He knows the world isn’t real, so why not just buy a big-ass blowup doll? Why not just wear your rubber Donald Trump mask to crowded theatre and flail your octopi limbs at the screen?

 

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books of poetry, including The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books, 2009). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Believer, Conduit, Fence, New American Writing, and Volt as well as in various anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize 2011 and 365 Poems for Every Occasion (Abrams, 2015). Her poetry videos appear in Requited Journal, Fence Digital, Triquarterly and Moving Poems and are forthcoming in Atticus Review and Battery Journal.