Discussing Death with Death Row Inmates
by Liao Yiwu | translated by Katie Farris and Ming Di
Each night of stars is a night of stars. No.
No? Each night of stars is a skull full of bullet holes.
We argue death inside brains.
We argue death under a fluorescent light
of hours.
What are hours? Shall we kneel down or stand
in the hours?
Will the bullet shoot through our chest or the back of our brains?
How is the executioner’s skill? How is his aim?
Which direction will our
brains splash? the moment the soul goes out is
what?
When the body falls into a hole, with its white ass to the sun, and
the body falls into the hole
will the legs stick out, erect, high, like flagpoles?
The iron chains crash into waves of River Styx.
On the eve of the shooting
doctor will pump away 1/2 of the blood from the arm
of a man.
A man will hear the sensation of comfort
as if floating
A man’s heartbeat slows down like a basketball game in the air
the dog-eating dog, larger than Saturn
barking over Saturn.
What are you waiting for, fools?
Go while it’s so comfortable, boys!
You are done, earth.
The earth should sign a will and testament
of the dying people
This bastard is called God
The bastard is called God
is licking us with such a big tongue of Time
The tongue that licks the arms and legs of men
Those born from
the mouth are without emotion
And we, born from the vagina
understand what pain is.
What is pain?
Even the bad guys have mothers.
Death is a white flag
a white flag is a light
a light is in a long tunnel
What is a tunnel?
It is a lovely
train, like a penis
ejecting a bullet in climax.
It will be very uncomfortable if it misses the vital part.
It will be very uncomfortable. The anal is now speaking.
It’s still a virgin.
Not fucked by the God yet.
Liao Yiwu is a writer, musician, and poet from Sichaun, China. He is the author of The Corpse Walker, God Is Red, and For a Song and a Hundred Songs, a memoir of the four years he spent in prison after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. His work has been published in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. He has received numerous awards, including the prestigious 2012 Peace Prize awarded by the German Book Trade and the Disturbing the Peace Award given by the Václav Havel Library Foundation. Liao escaped from China in July 2011 and currently lives in Berlin, Germany.
Katie Farris is the author of boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011), a hybrid form text which has been lauded as “truly innovative,” (Prague Post), and “a little tour de force” (Robert Coover). She’s a co-editor of Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press, 2014), and has also co-translated several books of poetry from the French, Chinese, and Russian. Her translations and original work have appeared in anthologies published by Penguin and Greywolf, as well as literary journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Western Humanities Review, and Hayden’s Ferry. She received her MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University. Currently, she worked as an Associate Professor at the MFA program at San Diego State University as well as a core faculty member at New England College’s MFA program.
Ming Di is a Chinese poet based in the US with six books of poetry in Chinese and four in collaborative translation including River Merchant’s Wife (Marick Press, 2012). She attended Boston College and Boston University and taught Chinese at BU before moving to California. She has translated many poets from English to Chinese including Marianne Moore, Anne Carson, etc. She edited and co-translated New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Tupelo Press, 2013). She selected and translated with Neil Aitken The Book of Cranes (Vagabond Press, 2015) and with Jennifer Stern Empty Chairs – Poems by Liu Xia (Graywolf Press, 2015). She co-founded Poetry East West journal and serves as the China editor for Poetry International Rotterdam.