Ghost City

LINLANG ZHAO

We sat on the chair, breath holding
the sparkling light under the fluorescence.
It’s summer in Shenzhen, when the humidity
strikes under the forty degrees.
Gas’ shade crystallized into
water vapors:
prolonged & dripping,
it’s our city’s climate.

You talked about Dublin with that
subtle smile in your voice:
The exile during the famine
your university project
on Eavan Boland,
or the rainy climate
with no hotness but water,

And there are two shellings colliding
somewhere in your wallet. Shenzhen’s
culture never melts them even across
the span of ten years. I found it ironic:

you’ve been here for a while,
and for that, I always
wonder how you could find your rain
similar to the summer rain that penetrates
the skin with blatant rudeness,
when Dublin is a ghost city:
it flows to the ephemeral side where
the river never reaches,
it grows under the shade of the foreign
Protestantism.

But still, you explained the choropleth
of Ireland in your eyes that carried your
own plain colours. It’s another
summer when I sit on my balcony,
and couldn’t differentiate Berlin
with Dublin, as they sound
similar in Mandarin
in the prolonged season,
in the sticky rain where the
two polars unite.
We are the same, back then,
when the wind flows across my city,
burying the afternoon rain
in Boland’s eyes. She was a
summer’s shadow
and only pressed her hand
against the old florin in
your college paper,
Or as if what Dublin is now:
which I could only felt
by pressing my palm
against the crystallized water
vapors on the train’s
window in Shenzhen,
and not for long
you said: it’s raining in Ireland.

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LINLANG ZHAO is a writer, poet, and artist from Guangzhou, China. She loves to bake fried milk and cookies, and she enjoys messing with her cat. She is the editor-in-chief of Fourteen Lines, a magazine dedicated to the art of translation. Her work can be found at the Midway Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Cetera Magazine, Tap into Poetry, and others. She can be found at @thisissobad1.