POETRY

The Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party

By JinJin Xu     Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 2020 Honorable Mention
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                                                                   “Once Mao Tse-tung’s thought is grasped by the broad masses,
                                                               it becomes a source of strength and a spiritual atom bomb of infinite power.”
                                                                                           —Lin Biao’s foreword to Quotations from Chairman Mao

The people have nothing.
         Let a hundred flowers

Bloom.
         Thousands upon thousands
 
Of martyrs usher
         the threshold.
 
Crimson fantasy,
         a dog
 
-Matic attitude.
         Lift up their heads.
 
The Chinese
         lift up a hundred
 
Barrels of guns.
         The flowers
 
Shut their eyes.
         The people, alone,
 
Bind war
         in thick ropes.
 
Ghosts,
         a now common
 
Language. Not
         living. Paper.
 
Dead. A storm
         so swift
 
And corrupt,
         the melody
 
Goes on
         shooting.
 





(all text sourced from Quotations from Chairman Mao)


JINJIN XU is the 2020 winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She has received honors from Tupelo Press, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation. Her films have exhibited at Berlin’s Harun Farocki Institute and The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is currently an MFA candidate at NYU, where she received the Lillian Vernon fellowship and teaches hybrid ballet/poetry workshops. Her debut, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, was selected by Aria Aber for the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming in November.



VOLUME 53.3