• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Clara Changxin Fang: The Other Side of Night

October 24, 2016 by PBQ

The Buddhist monk instructs us to pay attention to our breathing but all I can think of is the way  
you touched me before I left for Utah, like oil splattered on the wrist, like snow falling on bare  
shoulders. For the next two years the great bowl of the Salt Lake valley was cleft by a chasm I  
could not close. The mountains are taller than I imagined. The Great Plains is vast like the  
Pacific Ocean. The distance between one who loves and one who doesn't. Not able to turn back,  
the people who lost everything built a city praising God on the snow white shores of that inland  
sea, and all who came to it admired its ship like tabernacle, its broad avenues, and its temples  
without windows. At the bottom of my suffering there is a door. The latch opened and I sank. I  
breathed in water and breathed out love. So much of it that it filled the oceans and the air, the  
fish grew wings and the birds grew gills, the eyes of the people were opened and no one killed or  
hurt one another because they saw the wound they carried in themselves in each other.

Filed Under: Contributors 94, Issue 94, Poetry, Poetry 94 Tagged With: Clara Changxin Fang, Contributors 94, Poetry, Poetry 94

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ March Slam Session!

PBQ @ the Pen & Pencil!

PBQ Slam Session!

Slam Session with PBQ!

PBQ @ Poetry Tent!

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org