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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 4019 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention China’s Abrade Mia She called it a reed flute and played its bamboo shoots with light breath and heavy hands. And the sound that fell was of trickling vowels, the steaming rain on soft, dark earth. While the wet notes of sugar cane shadowed her through thick grass. She played wherever the stage was set, dancing on the cold river in springtime, crushing plums beneath pointed shoes sewn in dull gold and cherry silk. They plied her with green spider wine until her body crumpled to the deck and she floated on with the current, red lips smudged against the wood. The dark crept up around paper lanterns. She danced, sometimes, on a velvet stage on the first floor of a marketplace. Wearing a dress slit up to pale thighs and twisting like the nightingales in their woven willow cages. They choked on jasmine scented smoke and shuddered against the bony fingers of pickpockets with jagged, grimy nails. And, like the nightingales, she sang behind her woven fan and coyly fluttered painted lashes. On the second floor they bound her waist and her breaths flowed shallowly. Herb medicine smeared on her forehead stung as she stared around with bleary eyes. Pimps and ham-fisted midwives; earwax extractors with wrinkled necks. It housed prostitutes with papery grins and arsenic white cheeks. A new wave of sing-song girls, their high collared gowns slit up to their yellow armpits. She danced without air on the fantan tables, skipping over grey crickets in cages. And the world around her seethed with life- slot machines, peep shows and two love-letter booths that guaranteed results. She danced around them and her painted mouth pursed, to blow me a kiss. |
