Poetry

Christopher Van Velser

By

Changming Yuan

The Irony of a Snag

1

You have long since died

But you will never fall

Standing deadly among leafy growths

Your body embodies a rebirth

Greening close to your rotten cycles

2

No one cares how you got

Into the waterway

But you keep trying to return

To the ocean, where all life

Originates, where your skeleton

Poses a navigation hazard

To any boat heading towards a port

Ventifact

A fact of fiction

A fiction of fact

Carved with the invisible

Chisels of the tropical wind

You will never undertake a finishing touch

Nor do you really need one

To bloom your inner being

Into a solid shape of beauty

Weathering against all civilization

Languacolonization

Is a British word meaning to modernize

To globalize, or to Americanize

All the colonies with an imperial syntax

Yes, it refers to the English Empire, where

The moon never sets, nor even the Babel Tower

Has a chance to rise, it was established to

Anglicize not only the local dialect

Spoken on each of those barren islands

But also the way all native minds

Living in the central parts of continents

Spell their own names, paint their road signs

In this wild world newly digitalized

You came, you see, you’re conquering

With a whole set of rules to grammaticize…

Changming Yuan

Changming Yuan, 9-time Pushcart nominee and author of 7 chapbooks, started to learn English at age 19 and published monographs on translation before moving out of China. Currently, Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver, and has poetry appearing in Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Threepenny Review and 1219 others across 38 countries.