Post Station

Dust particles become a damp drizzle, an altered sky—
The air so strained it strangles struggle in the chest.
Everything is pressed into the cavity of the ribcage,
growing heavy, stifling, moldering into fungus.

Modern people labor at tasks from before Christ.
Bare torsos, untouched by smoke, yet blackened utterly—
counterfeit cured meats hung on scaffolding frames.
Where the heat scars, fat sizzles and rolls,
and the whole piece of flesh twitches, curling in on itself.

In a blink, a person becomes an earthworm,
dragged away by ants.
What roars all day isn’t a fighter jet,
yet a war perpetually unfolds.

The separation of brick from wall,
the merging of cement and sand.
Fortifications are torn down, built, and torn again.
What's sacrificed isn't just life, but living itself.

All bets placed on a single brick.
If one day
it shatters a skull, stained with blood,
will history remember to preserve it, make it a relic?
And the hands that laid it?

The chisel winds its path across the wall—
each fresh, crimson gash
steaming—will eventually be adopted by time,
transformed into a scar of somber red.

That one who writes poems upon the wall,
who will take him in?
What color will his scars become?

​

Sang Yan, Hao Liang. Sichuan natives, post-90s poets, early members of the Migrant Worker Poetry Society.