We’re proud to feature our first Spittoon Monthly poet, Xiao Yue (Shelly) Shan. Swift and lucid, Shelly glides among past and present, East and West, intimate and wistful poignancy.
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you’re the one who left but I want to talk about me maybe I won't go to sleep wander down by winchester and rose put my cigarette out on the wall of the croissant stand where you could see ginger's diner on the left side if I’m going to talk about us I can never be fast enough with the way you would’ve told it sounding like flutes sounding like yesterday sounding like your key in the door any minute now tonight the stars call out to one another on telephones so who can blame me when I say I can’t sleep walk three blocks to the vietnamese restaurant annie always took me to which after I met you became the restaurant I always took you to which after you left became a temple, even though we were ashamed of our worship, as if it were sin. prayer, is that what it was, all those days gasping for breath when we stifled it with aluminum. when we ate it up in neon orange quartets. how do I say I’m sorry? I even asked the waitress when she dropped off our coffees and you were in the bathroom but by the time you got back I still didn’t know. that was when we never slept. hours from the night hurried and white broken open like sugar packets on the table while you looked over my shoulder and I sat six thousand miles away on the other side of the table and when I reached out for your hand it seemed so silly that I took a packet of marmalade instead. you wouldn't stop digging your nails into the lacquered rivers on diner tables, even when I asked nicely. even when I hit you. you were so beautiful under florescent lighting all apricot cheeks, all that blood popping like bubblegum in the whites of your eyes. your face a puddle of milk on the countertop like a saint done up for a night out on the town with the girls when outside the window it wasn’t really raining. right now is about when the trains stop running. still by the station bodies hover orangely in the light, flickers of fingernails and eyelids vaguely brighting. I see you there, wings drilled into your ankles, up and down the hyacinths on st. james. the bridge of your nose through a small flame. the sight of your naked legs crossed holy on the windowsill. how can I sleep, when the way you kissed me made my mouth so glad to have lips full of blood.
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13: 11 JST as if our watches were taxi meters we count time by distance traveled, for if we measured minutes as minutes, hours as hours, wouldn’t it seem as though we have nothing? and isn’t it nice to look at names of places, even the ones we’ll never go to. shodoshima to megijima, takamijima to ibukijima and all along the inland sea as if this life were one made to be spent all marked up with salted fish and wild grapes, as if we opened our wallets and found no coins, but only meters. along meguro river everything seems edible, even though no one is able to dip their bodies in the water. the simplest solution, absolving the question of passing time, to stay in our bedroom overlooking the cherry trees, and say to one another that we have places to go, yes, but not yet. not yet.
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in which we have never returned from our wars when waiting becomes something to measure eternity with. and because time has no quantity it is able to detain a whole country in its dark, oaken, stasis. imagine holding a december letter from your son who is somewhere in xinjiang or siberia and having to find one of the three men left in the village who could read. my father answered a knock at the door every couple of weeks during the winter of 1969. he said some- -times he would receive lightbulbs in brown paper still warm as thanks and that most of the mothers did not cry as much as the fathers. even then he was proud of his country and the men willing to die ordinary deaths— by ice by starvation for it. it is strange to think that a land can build itself up and wide and grey without the days ever seeming to have gone by. men blackened by snow and going slowly away. with them standing so still like this. hands open like this.
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only saying meanwhile the music from the street fades as does the last of the wine from the glass and cigarette ash falls into the inner margins of the open book. the weather on the back of someone’s mind will be realized at the break of day. there are many more things than there is space, which seems like a mistake someone should’ve caught, before it happened. tepid spring rings in with a pinking of branches and nothing is as worrisome as dinnertime. a fiction develops in the way the living so effortlessly eclipses the dying and it is dry and ordinary and clear. the varying of speeches, the whiskey of the hour. the slow impatience of love maybe opening the front door and returning.
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we don’t say what if reading edith wharton I saw myself too in the age of innocence among golden hieroglyphs that hung in the air like half-risen question marks satin shoes that pinched the heel and molasses sandwiches and brandy and men who didn’t like to dance but would I saw my feet in mary janes and before them I saw new york yellow flowers and holding concrete I saw bay windows and lace handkerchiefs I saw the vision and then beside the vision reality looking just as real as daffodils I walked out of the opera house I dropped my glove I saw the back of my hand the colour of the back of my hand and it wasn’t new york but shanghai no mahogany no ivory no red marble or smoked glass but there were signatures ashed onto brick and windows held together with handprints, the streets filled with straw in case something needed to be burnt there was no jazz though plenty of cigarettes still I wasn’t to be outside at night though even daylight seemed narrow next to the blues and the reds who held their symbols close to them— one for a nation one for the people as if one necessitated destruction and the other would celebrate I saw myself at a table not talking I saw that we waited and we waited as my mother filled a pot with dried yellow flowers and my father said what will happen to china? the age of innocence was indifferent but it wasn’t its fault zelda fitzgerald was dancing in the fountain at the plaza because the twenties were brilliant full of light full of air if I had been there would there be satin and pearls whiskey for breakfast or woodsmoke and ink and my long black hair stranded in the branches of a plum tree would I have known there was a war coming would gene austin be playing on a cassette would the vinyl tablecloths be pink and green would I be drying my hair of fountain water you were born at just the right time my mother said my mother who had never read fitzgerald or wharton said as if very proud of herself as if she had done her best because I was born at just the right time and had it been any other time no jazz though plenty of cigarettes they started killing people at zhabei at the fruit market by the railway station and the thing that would save lives that day would be forgetting to buy apples you were born at just the right time she said as if out of fear that it could’ve been any other way her own fear her learned fear because in all the other times I could’ve been hanging linens I could’ve seen a pretty watch in the window I could’ve stopped in the middle of the street and remembered to buy apples
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Xiao Yue (Shelly) Shan is a poet and essayist born by the Bohai Sea, raised on the Pacific coast, and currently living alongside Meguro River. Her pieces can be found in Grain Magazine, The Shanghai Literary Review, Redivider, The Briar Cliff Review, and The Asian American Writer’s Workshop. Her poetry has received the 2018 New Millenium Writings Award. Her first chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love, will be out in Fall 2019. She haunts the internet at shellyshan.com.
Spittoon Monthly publishes one exceptional short story or set of poems on the first Monday of every month.