Hong Kong Sue Zhao

When I didn't know how to live I became my grandmother: opening windows in the morning early enough to see the light sifting between the curtains, I swept the floor with a bamboo broomstick and made breakfast.

And in my head came her raspy voice and her soft voice and her quiet voice; which rarely laughed but was always delighted with living and eighty years of reticent habits cultivated by her small hands.

She had not always been loved, so she knew all about love.

And on days which were longer and longer still, on returning home to an empty apartment in that spectacular city - her voice emanated like bells.

You must be hungry, she said, looking over at what I was cooking. And I laid my head in the lap of her voice, nodding. I am, I am.

[i have taken a bite of this root] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

i have taken a bite of this root pockets on paper openings on paper black screens as for the rest, trembling trembling a hole in the sky by yielding it would be by yielding it would be a long waited impossibility too quiet phantom sum art does not go into the monumental in art, but searches for the petites choses, the primal movement, the flickering of light. it looks for the roots of the language before it is born on the tip of the tongue, it goes toward the thing before it can be turned into a sculpture. color is accepted only while it has not yet become some special kind of colour. in music it is the sound before it becomes a score, music, or a symphony. literature is sometimes only the page before it turns into a written page in a book. sum-art makes, so to speak, an effort to create a retrogressive evolution. it is the spiritual in colour icelandic wisdom of eccentricity penetrates a sum art that extra ordinary individual and only wisdom known in iceland, the wisdom of isolation, of the individual outlawed human being. hreinn’s piece i spend the day with the sun i spend the night with moon and stars reflection on creation creation being not just a mirror image. it is this, and at the same time that so it is both a vow somewhere between this word w o r d avow just before the word begins avoue even before the word begins just before this w o r d ends some where some time before this word said this w o r d written word suspension the last breath taken before uttered before sound formed the gest before the instrument sounded and it is not THIS word. the sound before it reaches ears when it leaves us before wind becomes felt and not end there. and end there. hesitantly before an act made hesitance. yet made. effort energy taken before act made yet made. and after accepting the passing— as it passes takes touch elsewhere taken from elsewhere. holding my breath trying not to try to not try to try to to try not not to hold back my palm could only open all the heart to burst az rain az thunder always this another time bearing over am doing one folding in another folding in one in another folding fusion . . . dispersion stagnant lac brûme le matin brû me le soir and hold and rock let enter contained statue coiled up eat from the end devour back to the beginning eat its way out of it through it into it back from it figure eight amsterdam28 june 1976

Seventh Circle of Earth Ocean Vuong

On April 27, 2011, a gay couple, Michael Humphrey and Clayton Capshaw, was murdered by immolation in their home in Dallas, Texas. Dallas Voice

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• As if my finger, / tracing your collarbone / behind closed doors, / was enough / to erase myself. To forget / we built this house knowing / it won’t last. How / does anyone stop / regret / without cutting / off his hands? / Another torch
• streams through / the kitchen window, / another errant dove. / It’s funny. I always knew / I’d be warmest beside / my man. / But don’t laugh. Understand me / when I say I burn best / when crowned / with your scent: that earth-sweat / & Old Spice I seek out each night / the days
• refuse me. / Our faces blackening / in the photographs along the wall. / Don’t laugh. Just tell me the story / again, / of the sparrows who flew from falling Rome, / their blazed wings. / How ruin nested inside each thimbled throat / & made it sing
• until the notes threaded to this / smoke rising / from your nostrils. Speak— / until your voice is nothing / but the crackle / of charred
• bones. But don’t laugh / when these walls collapse / & only sparks / not sparrows / fly out. / When they come / to sift through these cinders—& pluck my tongue, / this fisted rose, / charcoaled & choked / from your gone
• mouth. / Each black petal / blasted / with what’s left / of our laughter. / Laughter ashed / to air / to honey to baby / darling, / look. Look how happy we are / to be no one / & still
• American.