the text will never be a
mirror, just the pale imitation
of a sunbeam’s fringes, an incidental
breeze, the grainy pink of an evening
glaze. and when it is pulled from a
shadowy place, it glows as a lantern,
radiant, no longer condemned to
murk. that is the task: to eke out
fluency, to contain the nebulous,
to trace the sunbeam back to its
source, one day at a time.
Jonathan B. Chan is a student at the University of Cambridge. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore. He is preoccupied with questions relating to faith, prayer, and identity. He has recently been moved by the writing of Frank O’Hara, Li-Young Lee, and Charles Olson.