BAKU
- Mar 7
- 1 min read
By Zhengyang Tang
To flee, or to look, or only to listen?
Baku, its nose curling round the iron cage.
From afar, a shrillness thick with ears, noses, and throats.
Like the smile you choose for New Year,
corners of your mouth grow ever more dazzling.
Flesh-zippers split open long, pale torsos,
the knives jerking, spewing waves of reek and brine—in the air,
red water worms’ carnival.
Breathe now; loosen your billions of warm, damp alveoli.
May you have eyes ringed like Saturn and be gazed upon.
May you have wings of fire-tongues and be lifted by the wind,
fluttering dry. Fluttering into a flag.
You will forget sprouting, ruminating,
and more. As if acquiring fear
were an easy, well-traveled road.
On the pebbled road of spine, segment
by segment, jealousy of Mammalia, vanity of Primates…
On some wasteland deep inside,
the ground crammed with labels—
cuneiform or kanji: Hominidae, Homo, Sapiens.
Heaps of fetuses that cannot see or hear,
wrapped in a wrinkled membrane—
may you go on making your mistakes carefully,
keep being bewitched. And then, you will inherit
a pair of eyes brimming full of compassion.
You can freely translate the Baku’s lament
— Gate, gate.
Then a twentieth-century housewife is at last vindicated,
joyfully lifting the fowls by their necks, beasts by their shanks,
wiping her apron, humming a waltz of life in its security,
then rinsing their blood away, massaging them,
coating them in paste, salting down another dream,
and roasting it till the aroma overflows.