Painting: Journal, Winter 2013 by Margaret Garrett

2009.10.20

Drive the brain into books like nails
Fix the heart to the Muse's chest

Chandeliers
Tuberose and scrolls
embroider notebooks—

Stars wave pumpkin flowers
Silk clocks withstand death

The painting of the Qingming Festival falls outside the body—
The crowd of books is a bee house of activity

and the posture I want to maintain
needs the palpatation of their secreted voices

No need to carry a mantle or mount a cross
for the weight of words is carved
in cut eucalyptus scrolls housed in the National Library

在图书馆伐木

用钉子钉脑子在书里
将心脏固定在缪斯胸腔

枝形吊灯
晚香玉和羊皮卷
笔记本里的刺绣——

......南瓜花编织繁星
丝绸斗篷顶着所有死亡

身体外的清明上河图——
人群，一座繁忙的蜂巢

我要葆有的姿势
需要一阵秘密嗓音的安抚

无需披风和十字架
为了文字的厚重
我砍伐国图的桉树

In 2010, Xu Lizhi, a 24-year-old migrant worker in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen jumped out of a window of a residential dormitory run by his employer, Foxconn, the huge electronics manufacturing company that makes Apple iPhones. After his death, his friends collected his work and got some published in a local Shenzhen newspaper, and it shows the alienation felt by migrant workers, who are granted few rights.

Xu tried multiple times to leave his job. Applications for positions in libraries and bookstores in Shenzhen proved unsuccessful. He also was turned down for a job at an internal library within Foxconn's compound. Xu moved away for a spell to be with his girlfriend in the city of Suzhou, but that relationship fell through, and he eventually made his way back to Shenzhen and Foxconn. In 2010, a spate of suicides put the international spotlight on the Taiwanese-run company, China's biggest private employer.