Hibernation.

Liu Xia

<TN>Di, Ming</TN>

Those who run all year round, the masters of this world, bustling from game to game, story to story, open a huge curtain to take the whole stage, in various roles as they want or in spite of themselves. They recite lines so perfectly like clouds moving over the running streams. I'm the audience hiding in a corner outside the plot. In the shadow, I sew a bedsheet so clumsily, as if sewing my entire life, all embedded, into the bedsheet that can only wrap my body. Nobody hears the cries of a soul in the stitches.

Translations from the ChineseBy Ming Di

Liu Xia (b. 1961) is a Chinese poet and fiction writer, widow of the Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo. Her first book of poetry in English translation, Empty Chairs (2015), was a finalist for the BTBA in 2016. She is also an artist with over three hundred paintings and several series of black-and-white photographs.

Ming Di is a Chinese poet based in America with six books of poetry in Chinese and four in translation, including River Merchant's Wife (2012). She edited and co-translated New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (2013) and co-translated The Book of Cranes (2015) and Empty Chairs: Poems by Liu Xia (2015).