February 2021

I have carved truth and beauty into yellowed parchment, having created something unique, vital, simple, complex, and bottomless as a fallen flower. The jagged edge of brokenness intrudes upon my soul, and dusty fingerprints outline the soul of this poem. The unbroken stretch of time has not erased these words eclipsing the sun and moon alike. What troubles they must have faced; what creative, poetic troubles would have gnawed on that author—spirit like moss and ivy on a house! Impossible feats are possible viewed the right way, melding dark and light into lines that are like a wishing well and looking glass. These rhymes instill visions that I thought would never come again, and the rhythm beats faster than fire. For me, I find a new renewal in this poem. After years of waiting to write that masterpiece, that pièce de résistance, word after word grasps into touch, paper, and ink to reveal the tide of inspiration. Amber Zhao, 10Brisbane, Australia

Battered plate, battered life. Plumed reed and paperbark surround that memorial, certain heirs of late afternoon and evening drifting like phantoms around that blurred steel lake, now ancient with new faces, my face lost in that ripple of glass, ripple that comes to all living things, the realization that life is not what you expect, and that glorious crown, charming everyone with heart-struck bedazzle, may tomorrow just be a faded visage of an earlier hope, withheld by a greater force, propelling everything. That tree waits, patiently, for its reincarnation as something, something, at least, for those cold words on the memorial do not signify anything about the kind woman who inhabited this place, or that gentleman, friends with birds and driftwood spears. It only quotes a name, birth and death date— but in that little punctuation mark, that tiny indentation of a dash, a whole life of sorrows, happiness, hopes and fears, all lost now on the gentle spiraled clouds, patrolling every speck-person day after day. In memorial of (insert person)—would they really want that? What if they detested that dear childish park, preferred the jazzy pace of mature metropolis life? I ask parents this; they shake their heads, clearly thinking, “The girl’s too old for her age.” They shake their heads again, but I know they have good intentions. They just don’t understand how I make magical spells, poems, out of mundane things, experiences, think such profound thoughts about life, death, eternity, and existence. But, well, that is my existence, to be honest. I do some research into their lives, with no success, and find the memorial tree again—the willow still weeping, its dainty leaves like fallen tears guarding the memorial, still highly polished, but faded with time and age. Without thinking, I cup water from the drought-sickened stream, pour it onto the memorial tree. It still looks sad. However, the next time I visit it, by an invisible change, it is happy: the falling leaves are tears of happiness, not sadness, and a delighted face uttering joyful words floats upwards like a ghost, is gone. Amber Zhao, 10Brisbane, Australia

“The sea’s cold,” is all you write from Antarctica, “and we haven’t seen any penguins yet. Hope we do.” How to analyze that icy wilderness, with its harsh arc of grandiose majesty, luminous glaciers otherworldly in the setting sun? The Earth’s veins will be hidden deep beneath the icicle-crusted ground, my friend, and the surreal wonders of stepping onto land after many days at sea, a sensation to conquer. I remember those waterfalls of ice, pluming into the distant rays of an underwater moon. Stinging chandeliers, jellyfish, pulsed deadly, deadly under a human touch, yet beguiling, a universal gravity drawing the fingers to the stingers. Translucent lives floated and flowered in a primal ripple-ring of wild nerves, and plastic floating billowed out like hollow silk. The drift of marine snow impacts our small universe of steel pens, the kettle’s familiar whistle and scissors left unpacked from their case. We journeyed down the wild underwater cavern, that labyrinth of darkness, a metallic lake, the Southern Ocean, reflecting and dissolving ourselves as we really were. As if the pulsing of the boat was gone, and we were no longer tethered to that rope on which hung life . . . and death. It’s been a thousand years, feels like it, since I descended the staircase of ice and snow for the first time. How, then, back from our trip, has life shrunk to this bare minimum? I gnaw on my pencils; suddenly the tree in someone else’s garden flushes red, blood on branches acidly looking up to the sky, and shifting forms in textures evolve. We walked together in Antarctica, strolling from the point where universe meets universe and back, breezes whipping endlessly, our twin fingerprints glowing transparently on Antarctic, sacred land. Now you are on another expedition, and we move on different axes; you acknowledge the penguins but do not study their very form, shape, soul, like me, tiny wriggling bulbs of black and white, alighting into the ocean. At night the color palettes would spring and turn above. Your final visitation was a quick one, that ghostly gaze of departure to Antarctica already spreading its languorous translation all over your pale silken face—imagining zodiacs, moving images in a world magnified by its sheer, brutal barrenness, and an escape to endless stars wheeling, even blizzards pouring down from the polar axis’s hemisphere. Amber Zhao, 10Brisbane, Australia