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Night People

do you know somewhere inside their language, lies something mine?

Poetry | JinJin Xu, slipper
September 17, 2019

The insomniac padding of a mother’s slippers strain yet amplify the nightly silence of a home. As poet JinJin Xu writes of the piece, “our desperation to be heard by the other, to hear the other” illuminates intimate scenes of a daughter’s imagination and a mother’s imagined presence. Playing with light and dark, glitching and cut offs, the poem gives physical rhythm to a self’s reaching for what does not/yet exist.


In this fifth installment of the Transpacific Literary Projects’s Slipper folio, JinJin Xu’s quiet poem echoes with the ritualistic footsteps of an absent presence and its untranslatable silence.

 

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