Sunday Stroll Through the Marriage Market
BY SALLY WEN MAO
Old women kneel in the square with open umbrellas, their granddaughters pinned to the nylon. Osmanthus trees, summer-buttered, torn—an August afternoon in the People’s Park. Sky overcast, the pink Shanghai smog a heavy quilting for the scrawls, damp printouts laminated, taped to each shelter: height, weight, measurements—Woman. Born 1990. Raised here. Educated in London. Speaks three languages. Virtuous. 1.60m. Hobbies— cooking. Playing with children. Flying kites. Virtue, the glint inside you turning dark. Man. Born in 1981, Hangzhou. Good job at a banking firm. 175 cm tall. Needs a caring, devoted wife, preferably born in 1980s. A strange man stares, asks you if you’re “looking.” You shake your head, I’m just a tourist. No, I am not alone. One truth, one lie. Lotuses scoff under the stone bridges, so pink you wonder if touch draws their blood. A lotus is not alone on its wet saucer—roots always connected to another’s blooming, another’s dying. Today you are not connected to anything. Another man offers to draw your portrait. So beautiful, he says. Are you married? You sit on the concrete as he touches a spot of graphite, forming eyes, a nose, a mouth you cannot recognize.
Pleasure Garden
BY SALLY WEN MAO
小姐姐,好漂亮 daily the love notes
from strangers in other hemispheres
can I live on these every day
without anyone touching me
—without anyone looking at my face in person
they don’t know the swollen
stone in my body, my lungs like a hagfish
a beat-up grin
∞
to be a woman poet is to disconnect, despair,
experience kingdom-destroying pleasure
at the museum I saw the hairpieces
of courtesans who ate raw osmanthus
from silver ewers
they ornamented themselves to resist
a promise of decay
but decay is just a matter of getting closer
to the earth
the worms breathing underneath all bored
punish me to lie down with my ears
on the soil, hear the footfalls
of past lovers, a clamor of pangs
—whose laughter hurts the most?
∞
in the pleasure garden, all my ex-lovers meet each other
snakes and snapping turtles bite the stems off water lilies
some speak English, others can’t communicate
some will make friends, others will make enemies
by the glow of the scholar’s rocks, they guzzle sorghum wine
and most of them hate poetry, so likely they’ll plot escape
some of them stay, develop an attachment to tending gardens,
some of them love snapping the bonsai trees’ miniature branches
some’ll survive on catching koi, roasting all their golden scales
some’ll sleep in the orchid pavilions, argue over how to leave
and I will not touch them, I hide in eaves, stay in the lookout
tower with my brass telescope, the past smudged on its lens
∞
in the pleasure gardens, the courtesans sometimes wrote
carp-bitten love poems,
painted silk mountains, ambergris,
embroidered lucky bats, blue peach trees
I read about them: how they destroyed their kingdoms
with their fatal beauty
how they rose up the ranks
and bewitched their kings
all the regicides committed in their names
and here in my corner I’m watching
the hot wind flog the legendary West Lake
bored by the supremacy of romance,
I eschew the water lily’s idolatry
the sight of them reminds me
that I do not want to live forever
