DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE Poem: Love Poem for a Dead Political Prisoner, by Peihe Feng

Your slow motion smile in monochrome: 1925,
an overcast afternoon in Canton. The moment

possessed by the zeitgeist–your ghost
entered as a warning sign; the only mourner

at this sacrificial rite. You were dressed
in all white, posing as a figurine of snow,

the jade-boned & ice-fleshed goddess in that Cantonese folklore
who wades the river and ends up disfigured. A photo:

your face blurry as a premature mural; your downcast eyes
watched as the raindrop stains turned copper

on your skin. The bullet sowed into your spine
was sprouting into a skeletal machine

that kept you alive as an unfinished statuette
poised above the pedestal of a crumbling country.

There is a footage of you talking, walking
among an ever-evolving shadow of faces (history

anonymizes us with identical numbness). Your gaze
floating over the camera, an extinct language trembling on your lips –

you were in agony and I exit the page to replay your funeral
filmed by some of the earliest cameras in this country. There,

your lead-white smile hang like a cold sun beside the flag.
I fantasized about coming back to you –

going back to stop you in what ways I can: hands
vainly grasping for the wind streaming out of your throat; lead on

with wide-open unseeing eyes. The two of us
sleepwalking in this landscape of oblivion and pain.