The Last Rites of Spring

 

You’re at another wedding. This time in a rose 

garden, and the air is fat with the laughter of 

strangers. The water in your glass smells of 

alkaline. The meat on your plate has been 

soaked in sweet wine. 

A man too drunk to stand is holding his glass 

up in the air, unsure of what he should say. 

This is your favorite kind of play, a farce put on

by people who perform their lives drowsed 

by the monotony of their private maddnesses.

You might as well be alone with the roses, 

walking beneath a night naked of stars, while 

up there in the mega dark a god disrobes itself 

of the distances that define it, and an alien 

rustles through the tall grass in your spine. 

Death is in the garden. It has always been 

in the garden. You only notice it now because 

it is talking to people you know, 

people you love.

The old man raises his glass again, clears his

throat, as if this had been his point all along,

            In the dream

I opened a tin of green roses and entered

into my childhood and in my childhood

I opened a tin of green roses


 
 

Chen-Yi Wu is a Taiwanese multidisciplinary artist. Chen-Yi got her bachelor’s degree in Chinese literature in Taiwan and completed her MFA in Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Having been cultivated by literature, theater, and filmmaking, her work is often hybrid in the field of film and media arts and focuses on how different media work in narration. Recently Chen-Yi has been collaborating with performance artists in New York and London to explore the pandemic experience of overseas Taiwanese. Her work-in-progress personal documentary “Uncle America” which tells the story of Taiwanese immigrants from a Millennials‘ point of view is selected in 2021 UnionDoc Early Production Summer Lab.

After graduating from Columbia with his MFA in Poetry, Evan Coles was briefly editor of the Oral History Project at BOMB Magazine. He then worked as George C. Wolfe's assistant on the Iceman Cometh at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. He then served as the associate director for To Kill a Mockingbird at the Shubert Theatre and Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus. In film, Coles assisted and shadowed on Wolfe's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Rustin and Joel Coen's Macbeth. In the Fall, Coles will be associate director of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson on Broadway.