Art by Joshua Sortino
My life has thinned out
like a sheet of moist rice paper.
A single drop of ink bleeds
into an ever-expanding patch of night sky,
while my remaining days shrink
into the empty white space—
the deliberate blank
of a lost Chinese painting.
Yuan Changming grew up in an isolated village, started to learn the English alphabet in Shanghai at age nineteen and published monographs on translation before leaving China. Holding a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently lives in Vancouver, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. With 15 total Pushcart nominations for poetry and fiction, Yuan’s writing has been featured in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poems Online and 2,197 other publications across 52 countries. A former poetry juror of Canada’s National Magazine Awards, his recent prose – including his ‘silver romance’ The Tuner, short story collection Flashbacks and the forthcoming CNF collection Return to Roots – explores the “hyperrealistic” intersection of cultural identity and spiritual cultivation.