Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marilyn Mei Ling Chin’s "Horse Horse Hyphen Hyphen: Border Ghazals: 3" continues the series with its signature fractured logic, linguistic play, and thematic preoccupations of displacement, identity, and history. The ghazal form allows Chin to weave together seemingly disjointed couplets, creating a mosaic of cultural references, personal reflections, and surreal imagery. Each couplet stands independently while contributing to an overarching meditation on migration, exile, love, and loss.

The first couplet—"I heard this joke at the bar / An agnostic dyslexic insomniac stayed up all night searching for doG"—opens with humor, but the joke quickly takes on existential weight. The inversion of "God" to "doG" plays on the confusion of belief, disorder, and sleeplessness. The image of someone “stayed up all night” suggests both literal insomnia and the larger condition of restless searching, a theme that resonates throughout the poem. This clever wordplay aligns with Chin’s broader concerns—how language, faith, and identity are fluid, unstable, and sometimes absurd.

The second couplet—"The prosperity sign flips right side up again / The Almanac says this Ox Year we’ll toil like good immigrants"—references the Chinese prosperity symbol, which is often hung upside-down to invite luck. The flipping of the sign could symbolize a reversal of fortune or an attempt to restore balance. The "Ox Year” (associated with diligence and perseverance) aligns with the theme of immigrant labor, reinforcing the tension between hope and struggle. The phrase "like good immigrants" carries an ironic edge, suggesting both the idealized image of hardworking newcomers and the unrelenting expectation placed upon them.

The third couplet—"Horse is frigid. Mule can’t love / Salmon dead at the redd"—introduces coldness and sterility. The "horse", often associated with movement and strength, is paradoxically "frigid”, while the "mule”, a hybrid, is incapable of reproduction. These descriptions suggest failed or constrained vitality. The second line refers to "redd", the spawning ground of salmon, which die after laying their eggs. This evokes the inevitability of sacrifice—whether in migration, love, or survival—where the next generation is left to carry on while the predecessors fade.

The fourth couplet—"One leg is stationary, the other must tread, must tread, must tread / The Triads riddled him, then us"—creates an image of imbalance and perpetual motion. The repetition of "must tread" intensifies the sense of compulsion, suggesting an unceasing struggle to move forward while being tied to the past. The reference to "Triads"—Chinese criminal organizations—introduces violence, implying a fate where not just one individual but an entire lineage is “riddled” with consequences. This could symbolize inherited trauma, systemic violence, or the broader dangers faced by those caught between borders.

The next couplet—"What is the heart’s past participle? / She would have loved not to have loved"—plays with grammatical structure to question emotional experience. The past participle—a verb form denoting completed action—suggests that love, too, is something that can be fixed in time, dissected, or possibly undone. The second line conveys regret, encapsulating the paradox of desire and detachment. The phrasing—“would have loved not to have loved”—captures the contradiction of wanting to erase an experience while still being shaped by it.

The sixth couplet—"I bought you at the corner of Agave and Revolucíon / You wrapped yourself thrice around my green arm and shat!"—suggests a transactional relationship, possibly with a lover, an object, or a memory. Agave and Revolucíon evoke Mexico, hinting at border dynamics and trade (both literal and metaphorical). The second line is both visceral and absurd—"wrapped yourself thrice around my green arm and shat!"—blending intimacy, possession, and defilement. This imagery destabilizes notions of love, commitment, and power.

The seventh couplet—"A childless woman can feel the end of all existence / Look, on that bloody spot, Chrysanthemum!"—introduces barrenness and mortality. The phrase "the end of all existence" suggests an existential despair, where legacy and continuity are called into question. The "bloody spot"—whether literal or figurative—carries ominous weight, and the sudden invocation of the "Chrysanthemum", a flower associated with death in Chinese culture, further cements the theme of impermanence.

The final couplet—"Shamanka, fetch your grandmother at the bus stop / Changeling, you are the one I love"—is haunting and enigmatic. Shamanka, a feminine form of shaman, introduces mysticism, suggesting a connection between generations and the spiritual world. The act of fetching a grandmother implies a crossing between realms—perhaps death, immigration, or reincarnation. The direct address to a "Changeling", a creature from folklore often exchanged at birth, reinforces the theme of transformation, displacement, and identity flux. The declaration—“you are the one I love”—lands with unexpected tenderness, though it is directed at a being defined by its otherness.

"Horse Horse Hyphen Hyphen: Border Ghazals: 3" is a powerful exploration of movement, inheritance, and longing. Chin’s use of the ghazal form allows her to layer contrasting ideas—violence and humor, barrenness and regeneration, constraint and transformation—while maintaining an undercurrent of linguistic playfulness. Through surreal juxtapositions and abrupt tonal shifts, the poem captures the disorienting experience of being caught between worlds, between past and future, between desire and detachment. In this space of contradiction, identity remains fluid, shaped by both history and the forces that seek to redefine it.

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