All Installed on a Mother Board
There is a time
When engineers
Will make chips out of people’s spirits
As a hobby
Someone I used to know returns from then
I have seen her recently
But she knows me no more
Even after I told her who I am
Motherboards,” she explained
“They are all transparent
Kept in the same big glass safe.
But no one knows how to open it from within
Or whose spirits are whose.”
Cloning
with a stem cell newly pecked out
of the largest wishbone of
a keatsian nightingale
you have developed a brand new bird
whose wings are feathered
with voiced strips, all parallel
to the sound waves of
a humpback whale, calling aloud
from the heart of the pacific
Biography
Yuan Changming, 8-time Pushcart nominee and author of 5 chapbooks (including Kingship [2015]), is the world’s most widely published poetry creator who speaks Mandarin but writes English. Growing up in a remote Chinese village, Yuan began to learn the English alphabet in Shanghai at 19 and published several monographs on translation before moving to Canada as an international student. With a PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan, Yuan currently co-edits Poetry Pacific and runs PP Press with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver. Since mid-2005, Changming has had poetry appearing in 1029 literary publications across 35 countries, including Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry (2009, 2012, 2014), BestNewPoemsOnline, Cincinnati Review and Threepenny Review.
© 2015 Yuan Changming, used by permission
