Jenny Xu was the winner of the 2015 Wendy Xu Poetry Prize for her piece, "Samsara."
A man of few characters
his tongue relaxed in admiration when his eyes glanced off
the swell of the Pearl Tower
the swerve of the World Financial Center
which she saw in her mind as a cheap bottle opener but he
saw as a samurai
sword in view four but in truths a two faced thing
a hollow glass pulse
Shanghai thousand faced carries her towers high
on hundred arms to distract disciples from seeing
her crueler expressions
chopping chives the woman knew
she retched when she stared
upward so she kept her eyes at smudged level
shoes
Not so her husband who still gawped like a country boy
The second transformation to fish on a block remind me crowed the Goddess who do you think you
are
Her slim synthetic pencil skirts still hang behind the television and she sometimes passes by to run
her fingers through sleek grain
Bent wide then thin she who had tasted
the sting of Maotais
She beat herself bloody against street tides
To think she had wanted to leave the curving stone pathways
cutting paddies into the characters they are named for
four squares within one
what balance
where the two wound home together when they were school children who called
for the child she had cast for his hand to bend him at right angles to her side
While walking out to get groceries she often thought she saw herself or a sister
a daughter recognizable
by the rural whiff of fresh pork and cheap denim sometimes she saw
only another stranger like the last spawned from subway maws
The hack of constant cigarette clouds
soon swirled through her nostrils to familiarity
nauseating fumes of sewers mingling with
grudging pangs for anything salvaged
from street side vats of fry oil pools
He hoists open hands halfway up to heaven
bundles of steel atop his spine
returning at night to the keeled cinder block within which she unrolls their daily bed
The excesses of the city crouch together there
particulate shot eyes veins reeling a chemical beat lungs flapping open gilled in supplication
burn yuan for mercy