Transcript

I think a lot about how numb so many of us can be, living in our own personal realities, trying to cope with the chaos and trauma of our times. There’s a distance that we are cultivating, a way of seeing the world through a gauzy haze so that everything doesn’t hurt so much. I feel myself doing this often, putting the veil up, looking at the world through my fingers, waiting for what could possibly go wrong next.

There are times where it feels like I am creating a character out of myself, a character that’s someone stronger than I am. Or less full of emotions. Sometimes, I’d just like to be the person that people often assume I am, a little more resilient, a little more polished, a little less likely to break apart into the real human mess that I am.

Today’s poem examines what it is to feel like a character in your own life. I love how this poem uses a film character to enter into the otherness many of us feel in our daily lives.

In the end we are humanlike: Blade Runner 2049
by Nina Mingya Powles

1)

I am what they call your cloud girl                       of the city of your dreams
invisible    music-box girl    no one sees

we play dress-up in the dark             unhungering
untouchingly I smile the right way with my                  mouth
I dance the right way           with the spinning light fields
of my hips                  undreaming things you asked me to       erase

you see blue eyes                   & unpinned hair but while you sleep
I am pure blue light                 nuclear
reflective particles &                   halogen glints
hypersensitive asymmetric              opaque waves
slowly unwanting                          unlinking myself
from your pulse                    into air


2)

a giant ballerina pirouettes by night across the skyline
her semi-transparence shines through dirt and smog
silver shoes and silver eyes with lashes freshly curled
satin ribbons on her ankles flicker pink and blue
the last remaining few who watch wait for her cue
when faint music swells and her curved arms
reach up to hold a dying sun and hybrid moon
they whisper things about the man who cast her into light
they mimic her in secret inside halls of rippling gold
they tiptoe up to breathe in something of her glow


3) 

I have never  been  allowed  to  talk to anyone,  so  instead  I  put  my birds
inside their dreams.

I have a favourite bird,  one I made for someone else but decided to keep
for myself.  It has scarlet  wings and a soft  blue belly  and bright patches
of gold under each of its  wings that  you can only  see when it is in flight.

I am the last of them—a woman with her own dreams,  not salvaged from
the  cloud-based  data lake that I created.  The lake is made of childhood
colours  that I poured in:  chlorine blue,  raspberry  icing  pink,  the  yellow
of  the middle  part  of  a daisy,  I  don’t  know  what  it’s  called.  I’ve  never
seen  any of these  colours in real life but I’m good at copying. I can make
them very real, but brighter, and soft at the edges.

"In the end we are humanlike: Blade Runner 2049" by Nina Mingya Powles, from MAGNOLIA 木蘭 copyright © 2022 Nina Mingya Powles. Used by permission of Tin House.