Ren Jie writes poetry and fiction. He recently graduated from Yale-NUS College in Singapore, majoring in Literature and Creative Writing, and currently works at NYU Shanghai as a Global Writing and Speaking Fellow. In his writing, Ren Jie engages with and explores questions about culture, religiosity, and the experience and narratives that surround familial life.
Amnesia in the Forest of Steles
Beilin, Xi’an
Confronted, then with chapped
strokes, the distant cry of a hanging cross.
I touch brittle stone. I touch words
longing to form calluses. To grace the well-worn
mouth. To ride the body, pooling themselves
as fleshly growths. In my own tradition
I speak sagas of waking men, pumping petroleum
into hotheaded veins. I sing of glue-smugglers:
the inky substance, like honeycomb ooze
sniffed to coax the sky
into star-less dance. I hear darkness
as severance, where cheap plastic burns the edges,
revealing longing. Yet this forest cuts. Metastasis,
where hands require amputation. Fingers
creep like treebark, arms dappled like branches
where tendrils ooze pustules, thick now
with pus. A memorial
fudges words. The glue-smuggler. Petroleum.
Desperate, I sing the warmth of playground plastic,
of the night hued purple and grey
some dizzying miasma of sparks
that speak human. Yet the groundskeeper’s broom
silences. Sacred, a body must tear and rise,
like sprites. Like crackled leaves,
we drift to form sky.