Diction front-loaded with shopworn sparkle (destiny adamantine jade infinite sunset horizon blossom heart gaze…) can reek of prefabricated verse, whereas speech treading on the heels of the quotidian can light your pants on fire. I ask myself what’s up with poems that come straight at me on first reading. Why does one cohere and stick when others don’t? Who cares? Celebrate it.
Without overquoting Winniebell Xinyu Zong’s “Bargains” (Poetry, June 2026), it’s possible to trace the arc of an affecting dialog between mother and daughter:
yuzi, where will mama live when baby grows up?
you asked me, your only baby.
mama in mama’s house, baby in baby’s!
[…]
baby always has a room in mama’s house.
does baby give mama the same?
[…]
we may be neighbors when i have my own family.
[…]
if we become neighbors, can we be so close
your door faces mine?
[…]
eighteen years later, near a swimming-pool-turned-
lotus-pond, you & i share a basin of crawfish,
[…]
between us, your new baby, sat by his screen.
[…]
we squat-sit, peel shells, let chili oil numb our
tongues. i am full. you persist; busy your chopsticks
in the remains. you ask again:
yuzi, if ma boil soup & want to bring you a bowl,
can ma find you before soup grows cold?
i pick off a rice grain stuck to your chin.
Eighteen years from the poem’s beginning mother and daughter squat dining near “your new baby,” a grandchild. The poem goes to the heart of a reversal that occurs, from when the child depends on the parent to when the parent depends on the child. For me it conveys affectingly, all the more for doing so in an offbeat fashion, how there’s just no way we can get from birth’s welcome mat to death’s door without help.
The matter-of-fact culmination, the poem’s last line, i pick off a rice grain stuck to your chin, evinces flair for telling by withholding, a delicate form of understatement that takes keen touch. The terse, level and plain can pack punch when rifled truly.
“Bargains” triggered for me that surge behind the eyeballs which I like to call “how sadness laughs.” I glimpse in it a negotiated love and constancy, surpassing creed and muscle, rallying themselves against life’s contingent frailty.
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
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