Editor’s Note
What are the possibilities of an interlude? An interruption in the delicate stillness of an audience, or an entry into sound, exits, actions, questions like, ‘What do you need?’ or ‘Can I get you water?’ or ‘What do you think?’ The interlude is the event that takes place during a pause.
Mea’s poems take place in that zone of in-betweenness, in a space that is geographically distant and “foreign.” Her poems utilize the gerund to describe the process of discovery and doubt, the event-fullness of activity and the wakefulness with which we understand and discern, all accompanied by a patient excavation of pauses and gaps.
In ‘Prefecture of Guangdong Province,’ Shanwei is “beginning” and the beachfront is “losing” and the vendors are “serving.” The blanks and pauses of the second stanza hush the first stanza, before giving way to something as complete and momentary in its form as the haiku that constitutes the third stanza.
Andrews’ poems know that liminality is not ambivalence, but also collision and a sort of uneasy, incongruent oneness. In ‘From the cats living in hutong walls,’ the speakers—cats—refer to the reader as a stranger and ask them to ‘listen in’ and then remind them that they can be active participants, that they have the authority to intervene.
In ‘Huìzhōu in April,’ the hotel is “still being built” and cars are “being parked.” The speaker watches other’s fireworks and pretends they are theirs. Actions are not fully complete or whole, and everything takes place at a remove, continuing to come into being. I hope that when you read Mea’s poems, you will see how the poet captures in language all the ways in which the interlude is not an interruption, but an event unto itself.
—Devanshi Khetarpal
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Shanwei is beginning to be touched by modernity, the beachfront losing its shells to street vendors serving spicy snail xiāngluó and sea conch hǎiluó, stir-fried with garlic and chili while hotels creep up its coastline. A stone castle nobody can tell me the history of, stands on the Red Bay, slowly dissolving into blue waters. Up the hill, a café overlooks both; a plump woman sitting outside makes monkey sounds at me as I pass, I call her cūlǔ, rude, and she screams at me in a Fujian accent something I barely understand. Later, when confronted about taking my photo without permission, she scoffs and demands I check her photo album. There’s an alcove past a statue of a general I don’t know where I could bury her phone under millions of broken seashells, the only ones able to find it would be translucent crabs and molting mollusks looking for a new home.
Shanwei is beginning to be touched by modernity, the beachfront losing its shells to street vendors serving spicy snail xiāngluó and sea conch hǎiluó, stir-fried with garlic and chili while hotels creep up its coastline. A stone castle nobody can tell me the history of, stands on the Red Bay, slowly dissolving into blue waters. Up the hill, a café overlooks both; a plump woman sitting outside makes monkey sounds at me as I pass, I call her cūlǔ, rude, and she screams at me in a Fujian accent something I barely understand. Later, when confronted about taking my photo without permission, she scoffs and demands I check her photo album. There’s an alcove past a statue of a general I don’t know where I could bury her phone under millions of broken seashells, the only ones able to find it would be translucent crabs and molting mollusks looking for a new home.
dissolving up hill
a woman outside screams some-
thing broken anew
Listen, stranger,
can you hear the rats at night
rising from the sewers?
Walking the streets
so brazen
as if I am not here
in the empty spaces
of these ancient courtyard
houses, waiting.
And during the day,
if I position
my claws just right
on the edges of these grey
bricks, I can stop
a pigeon cooing
faster than his
feathers can rustle
him away.
Can’t you stop
trying to call me
from my spot
in the wall
that has left me fatter
than you could ever
aspire to be?
We arrived in the afternoon
at the hotel still being built,
glass pane hovering above
the doors to its entrance,
slowly climbing
to the eleventh floor.
From our room on the ninth,
we can watch cars being parked
in the ebbing tide,
photos being taken.
Feet soaking
in the small balcony bath,
I watch and hope
the sea devours them.
For the first time in months
we’ve escaped Shenzhen’s koel,
its wroo-wroo calls.
They are parasitic,
dropping a single egg
in a crow’s nest
with the host bird’s young.
We welcome the night.
We watch someone else’s fireworks,
and pretend they are ours.
In the morning
we walk the beach,
sprinkler ends stuck in the sand,
black powder circling scraps
from the night before.
At the shoreline
my husband sees his first
washed-up jellyfish,
resisting the urge
to step on its translucent body
to feel the squish.
We find spiral shells
like unicorn horns
washing in,
little crabs hiding inside.
I check an orange-striped shell
for an occupant.
Not finding one,
I take it with me,
giving it a bleach bath
in the hotel sink.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: © Zhong Biao. Dawn of Asia. Screen printing (2010). Dimensions: 30 x 21 cm.
Author | Mea Andrews
Mea Andrews is a writer from Georgia, who currently resides in Shenzhen. She has her MFA from Lindenwood University and is still trying to learn how to make writing profitable. You can find her in Gordon Square Review, Gutter, Orca, Oyster River, Potomac Review, and others. She was a 2022 Pushcart prize nominee, and had a poem up for Best of the Net.
