Tulips
Editor’s Note: Borrowing Sylvia Plath’s Ear
“The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here./Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in./I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly/As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands…”
—Sylvia Plath
Like a proper dragon soaring through blue sky, these poems from Lotus’ fall edition leave their surly thumb-prints on the curlous clouds overhead, leaving you to rifle through our lime-scented pages of ergy; In the spirit of Sylvia Plath, we invite you to cut out our tulips and write your confessional. We salute you with a demitasse of a bell-jar of mighty-mighty!
Time was when poetry was neither audible nor dim, but just a swiggle of traffic at the cross-roads in Sunnyvale, California, in Sun-town, where blue griff shadows know their computing life and aphrodisiac mizzens. There were a dozen reasons to be grateful for the red stars and their blinding composure, their imperial veneer, and their letter-case verbatim. Whatever the blindman said in the middle of the terse night, his words were laced with the big P. Poetry for the poor tree which sways to the left and to the right in the roiling wind, give or take a few whiplash strokes. Pure metaphor impregnated with subconscious lacunae will take you there, to the big splash, to the fancy Party of Fools, or the radical elevator of thought.
Up and down. What is this helium, kool-aid balloon of creativity that jots you into disbelief at your own flowery reflection? Who is Du Tu in your life now but the lonely j-walker in the terrible siren lights, playing mandolin with his heavy heart. Drop a bleeping five cents into his super stellar cup and they’ll say bravoo; as for dreams of the way the old homeland sets upon your pillow like a quartz moon, spigoting wild, random joys into your life, those dreams are to be collected like rafferty ikebana and sagebrush, circular bird-shit wires and old ramshackle tires that spin ever so quickly on the terrace.
Spaces that cut between the words of the alphabet and their elegant pin yin. Whimsical starburst into that meadow of wavy dreams, imbued with myths a-darkle with strange rhymes and allusions to strange times. Could it be that poetry was becoming more symphonic without ever actually flying through the kitchen window, a “bitchin’” experiment of windy repulse to the tin cup and the cosmos, where nativist self comes with uber-complaint against the indifferent world. Reeling against its second-skin of hysterical subpoena against the cynical tirade of Big Brother Politics and crass demagoguery, the Poet stands alone under the sumpteenth moon, reading Neruda until his watering socks run dry. I, for one, cannot see a better to spend an afternoon or a life.
Cheers,
Carrie Chang, editor