An Ominous Day

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Dark and stormy clouds in the sky — Photo by Imtiaz on Unsplash

This piece by Sun Tzu-ping is translated by Nicholas Wong

       According to the traditional Chinese calendar, the Dragon Boat Festival 
       (which falls on the fifth day of the fifth month of the year) is an ominous 
       day.


Another new disease was invented.

We sat in protest, listening to God call out our names 
We drowned half of our bodies in the ever-rising heat 
The weather war that distressed the indigenous people 
Had returned
It could not even wait for a dragon ark to dock

We decided to put on fake faces, misrecognizing each other 
We went to the most bustling street
And watched a statue cross the road
Perhaps the day before the verdict was delivered 
The setting sun would char the trial result Germs and ashes would rise
And shroud the fingers I thought were the loveliest

I would anticipate:
Each glass pane to be smashed by love-ravenous eyes
A high-speed train cabin to black out in the next second, as predicted 
The soul to experience the wrecking of steely architectures
Pets to eventually come down to being someone’s food

Cities of no exits, nations that melted, 
A universe wiped by cravings . . .

They pointed to the same question:
Are we that lucky to witness the apocalypse?

If the Earth was never destroyed
But gently dusted the spare people off its body

Translator’s Note

In 2019 Taiwan became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. As only one example of literary writings by Taiwanese LGBTQ+ authors before this recognition, Sun Tzu-ping’s poems showcase male same-sex desire by situating the desire in an urban setting that is simultaneously oppressive and embracing. Sun’s poetry offers a pleasurable yet unsettling texture with his attentiveness to language (Taiwanese Mandarin). His lines are often enriched by absurdity, as he experiments with the subject-verb collocation to reveal the hidden in the visible mundane.

Sun Tzu-ping

graduated from the Graduate Institute of Creative Writing and English Literature at National Dong Hwa University. He is currently an editor at the Liberty Times. Chinese titles by Sun include Knowing Shadows (essays; 2015), Sentimentalist (poetry; 2018) and Male Bodies (novel; 1998), among others.

A man with short, straight, black hair and brown eyes. He sits in front of a white background, wearing a patterned, blue-and-black jacket, a white undershirt, and black jeans

Nicholas Wong

is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021). He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

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