Untitled, Still

by | Jul 24, 2024

Watercolor painting

Untitled (1997), Runhan Pan. Courtesy of Phoebe Pan.

           for 奶奶, in the land of steady hands

Upstroke, downbeat, the waves fathom
towards the shallow surface of spring—

           hiss      lake foam
                 of
           
thin                  rain
                     slicked                         concrete

—I follow their erasure, leaving nothing but
memory’s weight        beached           to the rattle of
flagpoles, unknowing against the wind,
as the lesson carves itself through me, a line taut
between limbs—

           I am not good, nor have ever been

 —a line with which I pull your phrase, insect-flight,
into the thin veneer of life between flesh & instrument,
a phrase nimble enough to curve my thoughts past dwellings
of company, as I look at you, another you, at the shape of a carapace
that once housed our past, & I watch the skim of gulls trace
their feathers to fog, remembering how the dead return
facing the sky of words we pretend to embody—

           grass     reef     ill      ember     fold

—not because they fit, but because they do not, because they allow
the cold to reach its hands along the small of our backs,
to touch what remains in this textbook of creaturely movement:
I lodge the words between my ribs, unbridle my teeth, & sprint
such that you could never call me good,
only the crest of manes breaking an empty shore.

Phoebe Pan

Publab Fellow 2024

Phoebe Pan is a PhD student studying early modern literature at Northwestern University. Their research moves through trans poetics, post/humanism, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They are a groundskeeper for the distributed humanities collective, Soupbone, and their collaborative poems have been published in AAWW’s The Margins and The Wrong Biennale.