After the Quake by Kit Fan
PN Review 266, July - August 2022
After the Quake
11th November 1855, 10 p.m.
The black-haired clouds that choked
the mouth of Arakawa River
weren’t clouds. And the grey stubble
that grew on the morning snow
in the rice fields
wasn’t only dead skin. The kids smothered
soot into their lampblack eyes
though footprints, a whole town of them,
had been eaten by the crows
that weren’t crows. New names jostled
their way onto the crowded
noticeboard. And snow landed on the ink
dissolving. I didn’t know what the bone-
coloured sky wanted but it kept begging me
to read it.
24th August 2016, 3:36 a.m.
It was your birthday. We kissed each other
good night. A dog barked and shook the lamp.
I turned off, left Aleppo behind with its limbs.
We slept with our heads elsewhere.
I woke and called the noise a ghost. You woke.
It threw us out of bed, naked. We crawled
under the IKEA table. Two wine glasses broke.
The ceiling fidgeted as the ground force mauled
the night for 30 seconds. We took our passports
to the open square. Sleepy kids in shorts
dozed like walnuts in their mothers’ hands.
Men smoked busily by the newsstands.
After an hour we went back upstairs
and shut the door. It returned, but milder.
We lay in bed like stemless sunflowers.
A dog barked and we kissed each other.
Kit Fan is a poet, novelist and critic born and educated in Hong Kong before moving to the UK at twenty-one. His first poetry collection, Paper Scissors Stone (2011), won the Hong Kong University International Poetry Prize. As Slow as Possible (2018) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and one of the Irish Times Books of the Year. He was shortlisted twice for the Guardian 4th Estate BAME Short Story Prize. He won the Northern Writers Awards for Fiction and for Poetry, the Times Stephen Spender Poetry Translation Prize, and Poetry Magazine Editors' Prize for Reviewing. His debut novel is Diamond Hill (2021). The Ink Cloud Reader, his third poetry collection, was shortlisted for the 2023 Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T.S. Eliot Prize. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.
This poem was featured in PN Review 266, July - August 2022. Subscribe to PN Review magazine at pnreview.co.uk.