Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: “Green Line” almost immediately disarms us with its simple, almost childlike ruminations on the complex nature of intimacy. It’s a poem of desire and longing, with a keen sense of place. The place is a cold hotel in Taipei and the voice is both passionate and detached: the perfect embodiment of the “split-brain” the speaker so desires. Former contributor Nicholas Wong masterfully translates Chen Poyu’s haunting poem in this week’s miCRo.
Green Line
Leaning on the cold mirror in a hotel
I keep thinking about a cruel question
I’ve heard that if a flatworm is cut into halves
The right half will grow back from the left
And the left half from the right
And a new brain will appear
If its head is chopped off
Before you come to your senses
I draw a green line on your body
As if to make a cow-pattern, uneven with patches of black and white
As if a tongue were trying to fold chewing gum
I want that green line deep
Into your body, that flesh-colored steamed-bun
Part of you will resist other parts of you
But no part will be held liable
It would have been much simpler if we were both flatworms
That we are not is unfortunate
So excuse me for having no choice but to draw a green line on your shoulder or flank
As if to make it look like carrying a few backpacks
As if dividing the Americas further into smaller states
How should one get rid of
Himself that is already so split to begin with?
I walk out of the grand, dizzying lobby
And notice it is getting colder
The streets are puddled
It must have been raining for a while
I shiver
And think it will be wise to get a jacket from Uniqlo
Don’t go, don’t, I think
I have walked side by side with you for a while
To come to the traffic lights
Born in 1993, Chen Poyu has won numerous literary prizes in Taiwan, including the Lin Rong San Poetry Award and China Times Literary Award. He is the author of The Bubbles Maker (essays), and two poetry collections: mini me, and recently, The Art of Rivalry. His Chinese translation of Robert Hass’s Summer Snow was published in 2022. He currently lives in Taipei.
Nicholas Wong is a poet, translator and visual artist from Hong Kong. He is the author of Crevasse, winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me, also a Lammy finalist in the same category. His poems and translations are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Epiphany, fourteen poems, The Massachusetts Review, and The Griffith Review.
