Ma Yongbo
Seaside Hotel
All night, they graze like horses on the ocean floor,
lamps overhead, one red, one white, snorting.
At dawn, they wake in separate beds,
the sea pours over their bodies,
carving the deeply grooved reefs.
She must return to the other side of the sea.
Unlike the young woman of years ago,
she no longer cups his face in the spray,
she pauses by the window, mechanically smoothing her dress.
In the salt-cracked corner of the warped wooden window,
a cluster of white wildflowers sways, magnified,
like her former self of years ago, returning from a distant cape.
Other work by Ma Yongbo