sending and receiving

by Shin Yu Pai

Shin Yu Pai, Hiroshima to Hope, Greenlake, Seattle, digital photograph, 2022. Courtesy of the author.

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SeNDING AND RECEIVING

SHIN YU PAI | NOV 2022 | ISSUE 20

instead of marking the anniversary 
of the day we were wed 

with dinner, we take our child 
to the annual lantern festival 

held at the manmade lake 
where we remember the victims

of nuclear bombing and those
we lost the year before

to Covid, cancer, & 
heart failure; we speak 

their names on rice paper, 
light tea candles, say prayers 

for safe passage for each 
branch that’s been cut: 

4th Uncle, Cousin Bo, 
our friend Geo, plus all 

sentient beings — 

my son’s class hamster found 
lifeless amid the wood shavings 

heart energy filling the open 
water and its contours with 

ten thousand points of light, 
losing sight of our own offerings

joined into one lambent glow

Shin Yu Pai, Floating World, silver gelatin print, 2003. Courtesy of the author.

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Shin Yu Pai is an award-winning writer and visual artist based in Seattle. She is a 2022 Artist Trust Fellow and was shortlisted for a 2014 Stranger Genius in Literature. Shin Yu is the author of eleven books of poetry, including most recently Virga (Empty Bowl, 2021). From 2015 to 2017, she served as the fourth Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. Her essays and nonfiction writing have appeared in Atlas Obscura, NY Times, Tricycle, YES! Magazine, The Rumpus, Seattle Met, Zocalo Public Square, Gastronomica, City Arts, The Stranger, South Seattle Emerald, , International Examiner, Ballard News-Tribune, Seattle’s Child, Seattle Globalist, and ParentMap. Shin Yu’s work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. She is host, writer, and producer of The Blue Suit, a podcast for KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate. She is represented by Tyler Tsay at The Speakeasy Project.