“I Forgot Where My Dreams End” by Wenxin Tang
I buried the capsule for so long:
Green shirts with not a pride. Into the woods of man-made
tropic: in mid-summer, a thick cotton
quilt of bed with 38 degree Celsius on AC;
countless times at the edge of the hell,
Never brushing her teeth, lock up in the single cell of the bathroom.
4 am, Shelley’s poem
5 am, lingering in the building as a zombie, the door eye is a patient in white
6 am, wandering into the playground, and here opens the canteen, a bag
of corn, snails and steel smashed into the stomach
The mansions moving around, off the ground into a mirage
calling for an ambulance from 3,000 miles away
with her last breath.
Like a street juggler, she roves on roads of Beijing
without an ID, shut down from hotels, she saw
the musical, and she said to a taxi driver,
“Drive me around.”
“Mind naming a destination?”
“Where you bathed in fire.”
“It does not exist on my map.” Hers does. She followed it to
the 9 ¾ train station: Next to Normal.
In the white room, a spider stands on a man’s head.
A cold voice of the nurse, like a beetle.
She heard her, mom, who said, “Go away, you lunatic.”
A warning: Keep it a secret.
Biographical Note: Wenxin Tang is a nineteen-year-old poet, non-fiction writer, and dancer attending New York University Shanghai, Undergraduate Class of 2023. She majors in Humanities, with a double minor in creative writing and dance. She is a poetry editor at Bright Lines Confluences and her poems have been featured in several magazines.