CHAMBER OF REFLECTION NO GLASS, NO MIRROR

Questions for writers who read, see, and expose themselves in their vulnerable language.

1. How would you describe your voice?

To visualize your voice: pin it down on a page. Let it scrub the surface. Let it leave black marks as charcoal does.

Let it leave wistful dots, unfinished circles, nostalgic oblongs.

a) Her shape and her color

2:20 AM. The grass slope. Green. Green polluted by the idle black. She rolls down from the top of the slope. Like an ignorant, untimely baby paving her way to reality. Fractured umbilical cord. Amniotic fluid. Damp air. In that dull membrane, she’s growing larger and older: her clenches are like two blind women’s handshakes. Void.

The membrane of night envelops her again. There’s no destination––the stop sign is muted. She screams: a fresh stream of dews and stones is pounding in her throat.

b) Her speed and texture

She moves like large mammals but she knows nothing about history. She wants to live like: the rhythmic stitches created by that pretentious sewing machine. What she actually is: a tied knot. Young enough to leave itself clueless.

c) What she left behind when she’s gone

Static hope: I think we are infinitely close to the final punctuation

2. Tell me about the reciprocal gazes that take the place of words.

The countless deaths of raindrops made the man almost desperate: these pieces of glass had already broken involuntarily. He was drunk and cast his gaze—unsober and prolonged—to the other side of the road. His hair pinned to his coarse forehead, his back curved, his feet bare: like a fetus, holding its primitive pride and anxiety. Enveloped by his immobility, he was secretly burnt and reborn. I hunch in that unfamiliar belly with my feet wet. Or shall I call this place a home? On the other side of the road, the girl squatted I can’t tell. I dream in Google Translate: be hind every sentence there’s a scraped robotic subtitle. Orphaned lexicons and twinned semantics.

under an eave, gazing: the lens in her eyes was so close to her pupils. Her furtive keenness was trying to break free. There, the man threw himself on the ground, imitating incessant deaths around him. Unlike the raindrops screaming in unconsciousness, he descended and fell apart as his brief gorgeousness still pounded, lively. The slight lines of raindrops between them were vibrating. How I wish to be sober, how I wish to narrate every steadfast falling of the raindrops to you someday.

Being characters of this insurmountable story, they were both suspicious about the perspectives that the world endowed them.

3. What do you feel when you are running out of words?

See the oily rainbow in that gutter? I tiptoed beside it. I cast a glance at it and shifted my gaze quickly. I even blushed: that filthy colorful world was forming and deforming by itself. My ungodly gaze was not a part of it. I should lower my head and write, lower my head and write, I chanted.

4. Tell me about punctuation: what’s between your words?

Jenny. 珍妮. Jen-ny. Zihan. 子涵. Zi-han. The precious one. The water soothes arid land in a motherly way.1 The insecure syllables peeling off from each other. Between them: undefined swirl of dust above the rug. White hair from my cat randomly ends up in my mouth. Hard to locate. Flawless oblongs of the airports. Heavy tongue of another language. My mother tongue is a ghetto for motherless poets.

Sometimes I’m confused by this furious form of water. Sometimes I’m confused by this gap in between: raindrops strike the sky into scattered mirrors on the ground. I gasp for air in the dense mist, while the deformed sky reflects my face’s hidden unreality. Between my face and the scattered sky, there’s this unfathomable distance being interpreted and yearned for—forever—

5. In what language do you dream?

Barefoot on arid land. 3:00 PM: A time always left unimportant and uninterpreted. Dust blocking my sight. 3:40 PM: sunset striking my black pupils directly, turning them into brown. 4:00 PM: a sound. 你知道裸露的土壤会使时间变 慢吗? Do you know bare soil slows the time?

6. Describe your fear of/obsession with words.

I always sit at the table beside the window to eat. I eat grilled chicken breasts and green beans. I drink iced lemonade. I read books that have bronze mirrors on the pages. I respond to the fragmented voices in one of them: And the point is, to live everything. I’m fragile enough to melt in the glimmer of any overgeneralization like this. Live the questions now. Now. I will do it now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Thank you for telling me this. I see the reflection of my face on the bronze mirror on the last page. My hair. The birthmark on the outer corner of my left eye. My mouth, slightly open, as if trying to say something. I overhear the conversations of the dying leaves outside: that blasphemous blossom in November.

7. Who would you write to if you could?

As a writer I feel ashamed to tell an incomplete story or write a malfunctioning letter—I don’t know how to arrange a fragmented narrative. Fragment: you are breathing in the stale air in that empty church. Fragment: we are kissing. The remnants of the stale air are passed on to me. Now I’m someone from the past. Fragment: I shiver because of that clumsy knock against my teeth. Fragment: immeasurable snowflakes.

Now what? The distance between us: skinlike, compressed air. Easily overlooked gap between the mattress and the white wall, full of tide-like pain and light-like wistfulness. I tell you I’m scared of commitment. I tell you I’m scared of outlining my emotions. I wake up in the middle of nothingness: a damp morning unintentionally left blank. Yet in that night’s dream the snow almost blocked my sight. You stood in the middle of a slurred one-way traffic.

8. How do you finish a poem?

I say it is a very writerly thing to visualize your voice: listen to the water. The torrent pounding her throat is bottomless. The dam. Her throat is scraped and tinted. Do not misread this rhythm as unending dullness. Do not rush to the final punctuation

ZIHAN ZHANG B’25 wants a pet frog.

1 Jenny=珍妮，珍(sounds like “Jen”) in Chinese means precious, 妮(sounds like “ny”) means girl. 子(Zi)涵(Han)=Zihan. “氵” in 涵 represents water.