Three Poems
My aunts circle walk for leisure in my living room.
“My neighbor is following me.” My bigger aunt stares at the ceiling.
“I was born an American.” My smaller aunt binge eats potatoes.
I am one person, not comparable. I travel very far as a result.
I no longer have living room.
He walks on the plateau
He dreams about a man walking on the plateau
He dreams about a man who’s him walking on the plateau
He rarely wakes up with a sun in his chest
He rarely wakes up with the letter O
He dreams about himself waking up in terror
With the letter O sizzling in his chest like a bright lamp
He knows the terror because he sees himself walking on a plateau
Nothing but a red sun behind a man walking on a plateau
The sun is getting big
The sun is getting big
The sun is getting big
The sea monsters committed suicide in the mountains.
There are no sea monsters in the world anymore.
That’s why he grew up
to work for Amazon.
He ate an expired skyscraper.
He was dizzy and confused.
He endured the night
and rushed to the bathroom
at dawn, vomiting up
a secretary, a security guard,
and a product manager.
The building's glass
shattered all over the floor.
He decided to take revenge.
He held the gun, not knowing
where to aim, and eventually fired
a shot into the sky. A dead
bird fell onto his head.
This was when he noticed the green sun.
He wanted to tell people this was a fake sun,
that it should have been red. But what other powers
might a fake sun possess?
Yuyi Chen
Yuyi Chen is from Sichuan, China. They are now a PhD candidate in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Erotic Continent is their first book, out now from discount guillotine. Their work can be found or forthcoming in Cleveland Review of Books, Nat.Brut, mercury firs, Blue Bag Press, and others. They go by Echo.
Lise Stoufflet
Lise Stoufflet (b.1989, French) graduated from the Fine Arts School of Paris in 2014 and continues today her practice in the suburb of Paris in Aubervilliers where she created and develops with fifteen artists Le Houloc, a studio and artist-run-space. Lise Stoufflet develops a work of painting and drawing, but also explores the object as a possible overflow of the fictional images she builds.
Her works are innocently disconcerting and beautifully surreal. Narrative is richly present in her paintings. The story is not always clear and, often times, unsettling. Part of this tension arises from Stoufflet’s beautifully contained manipulation of colour, which marries a contrast of pastel, soft colours with rich, dark hues and creates atmospheres of mystery and intrigue. Each piece is a snapshot of a larger whole, a hint of a story without really revealing anything about what is going on. These moments are richly evocative of something, and Stoufflet is almost toying with the viewer, dangling the thread of answers before their eyes, yet showing almost nothing at all. Her works invite viewers into a conversation with her paintings, her colours, her forms.