Chrysanthemums
Lotus Magazine Welcomes a Season of Joy
greenish tint of white spider-chrysanthemums resembled the moons’s color, but that was lighter, lighter.
— Denise Levertov
“Mum’s the word” on the well-lit, rotating planet, abandoned to the acidic tango of the hours and and tempestuous breathers, long-stemmed mums prayed to on a winter’s day when the tea is cold and the heater is humming part-way like a bad-ass zither; all the days of leaning on Proustian dreams are now upset by the random clock and the cuckoo pen with all its oracular goodness, of ratso bears and optical delusions.
In the basement of Lotus and literary twerks, shock white chrysanthemums are circling in forward motions, like the gold-stained harbingers of the Soong Dynasty rapt with locomotion fingers, and desiccate petals of Guanyin do wilt endlessly like wild tear-drops, when the jujube soup sated. That was blossoms of gold peat, rapier knuckles on the curvaceous tea-kettle bent in dual harmony, an urge to scribble a zot. “Mums” the word, when it comes the haunting of old times in the granary of the mind, when poets correspond with each other with better hearts in the season of sad longing. What ars poetica could take you to a faraway land of Lotus, in electric radio hall city where dull-faced aesthetes long to chat and gossip all day of their favorite poems and stories in the garden of forever? Sing me one or two.
— Editor, Carrie Chang