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Jan/Feb 2021 • Vol. XLIII No. 1 • Poetry |

Memory Soldier

In June 2020, the photographer Li Zhensheng dies on a hospital bed in Queens, New York, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 79.

A torn color. That red of clots, flags, armbands. Of ropes of firecrackers that irradiate the past. Of eardrums, blasted doors to the mind. Of all that drains from opaque masses.

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Photo of Jenny Xie
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf, 2018) and The Rupture Tense (Graywolf, 2022), both finalists for the National Book Award. She teaches at Bard College and lives in New York City.

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Expenditures

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Soft, that tear of water. Which signals dreaming’s low boiling point. I draw down my eyelids, turn my head.Here, the camera fuzzes. What remains out of focus is the foreground, […]

Unit of Measure

By Jenny Xie

Bees keep no appointments. They rasp open the lid of each day to dip into fool’s filling.Meanwhile, there are those in temples who bring the breath to the body’s surface: […]

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