Jianqing Zheng: Site Visit
The Valley Store in Avalon, Mississippi, long abandoned, still holds its worn-out sign above the locked double doors. Many years ago, John Hurt lived nearby.
Jianqing Zheng: The Overlook
I embrace two rivers, the Changjiang and the Mississippi, each taking a share of my tributary for thirty-four years. Life is a river. The migration from East to West is a way of releasing the self for a confluence of places and allowing the rivers to flow through me and form a shoal of belonging.
John Zheng: Poetry as Enchantment by Dana Gioia
“If poetry is the most ancient and primal art, if it is a universal human activity, if it uses the rhythmic power of music to speak to us in deep and mysterious ways, if the art is a sort of secular magic that heightens the sense of our own humanity, then why is poetry so unpopular?”
Jianqing Zheng: Moonlight
Always after dinner, Yao, who memorized almost all of Beethoven’s musical pieces, played Moonlight in the living room.
Jianqing Zheng: Mama Nell
spring sunrise
pear blossoms take on
a shade of red
John Zheng | Valediction: Poems and Prose by Linda Parsons
Parsons’s contemplation moves from shaping garden beds to shaping life. Garden is an island of necessity where her “orbits in and out of the perennial beds” have shaped her life for thirty years.
Jianqing Zheng: The Dog Years of Reeducation (excerpt)
When the sampan glides to shore, the bird lands back on the shoulder of the rowing girl while lotus leaves whisper in the morning sunshine.
