If you’d wanted something else,

you would have been a different 

person. Right? All those afternoons 

on the train to the city, whisked through 

where you’d never walk, warehouses,

bus yards, oil sheening the still

water of the old marshes, wire

fencing, an egret, the double-take

of its neck, you’d never learn 

anything about them, the impounded

U-Hauls, what residue 

the smokestacks feathered up,

the names of the grasses before

train or city had ever existed, cables

tensed parallel to the tracks

and the flat coppery everything

else, they made you

long, but not for them, platform

clocks, the noncommittal cirrus,

land spilled low, how 

to tell the light from light

pollution, orange light at that

time of year, gold, almost, and you didn’t 

want the city 

either, it turned out.

Published July 18th, 2021

Robin Myers lives in Mexico City and works as a translator. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Yale Review, the North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She writes a monthly column on translation for Palette Poetry.

Wei Tan is an artist based in Berlin, born in Malaysia. Tan earned a BA from King’s College London and an MA in Music Technology from New York University, Tisch School of the Arts. In 2015, Tan began abstract painting as part her exploration into visual sound art. She has since exhibited her paintings and sculptures extensively in New York, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Berlin, Penang and Shanghai. Tan’s recent exhibition Rooms and Interiors can be viewed online through Arte Globale, and more of her work can be found on Tan’s website, smart-collectors, and AucArt.