Shin Yu Pai
Shin Yu Pai is a poet, essayist and visual artist. She is the author of several books including Virga (Empty Bowl), ENSŌ (Entre Ríos), Sightings: Selected Works (1913 Press), Aux Arcs (La Alameda), Adamantine (White Pine), and Equivalence (La Alameda). She served as the fourth poet laureate of the city of Redmond from 2015 to 2017 and has been an artist-in-residence for the Seattle Art Museum, Town Hall Seattle, and Pacific Science Center. She is a three-time fellow of MacDowell and has been in residence at Taipei Artist Village, The Ragdale Foundation, Centrum, and The National Park Service. Her visual work has been shown at The Dallas Museum of Art, The MAC, and The Museum of American Jazz. Her poetry films have screened at the Zebra Poetry Festival and the Northwest Film Forum. Shin Yu’s nonfiction has appeared in Tricycle, Atlas Obscura, and Zocalo Public Square. For more info, visit http://shinyupai.com.
seaweed sprinkles
down the street from my house
Buerjia closes its doors when
troubles procuring the main
item in their signature dish
force a closure,
it’s not sauerkraut fish
without the tilapia, over at Trader Joe’s
the shelves are bare of canned green chiles,
gluten-free pancakes,
my son’s favorite furikake,
the annual gingerbread house-
making cookie kit not yet in stock,
I think about this season’s authors
their publications pushed back
yet another year, books stalled
at the printer’s, delayed by
international shipping, paper
shortages I’ve read as I eye
my stack of dwindling post-it
pads covered in handwritten notes
scattered ingredients for unwritten poems
stale fish syndrome
some smells overpower
in how they mask the character
of what lies beneath, the uniqueness
of pheromones scientists suppose
that certain animals,
felines for instance
know the whiff of impending
mortality in the cancerous body,
before death’s final rattle,
humans are less attuned
to olfactory awareness covering
up the musty languor of lifetimes
with the chemical perfume
of an Irish Spring, the air
freshener for the corpse that’s
in its last days, our relevance too
bearing the rasa of decay