Selected by Derrick Austin
A Brief History of Cinema
Having fallen in love with a student, a spy,
who works by day as a Chinese teacher,
escapes on a train to Kyoto. The student,
whose debut cinematic role
wins her awards, plays a housemaid in an indie film,
undressing herself to an unfazed math genius
which shames her parents. When the war ends,
she marries a battalion officer who in ten years
will become the president. And the president,
who adores cinematography, disbands
all film studios. Two kids sit by the shore
(one will overdose in twenty years)
building sand castles. They dig up a black box
containing the President’s badge—
this now becomes the trademark intro
to all domestic films. The other kid,
who smiles at everyone he meets, later assassinates
the president when he visits the set
of a feature film based on his rise to power.
We have artistic differences. When they catch him,
he’s mumbling, sobbing. The anchor cuts the news short,
announcing the invasion of a neighboring state
where people look like gray crows. The crows
find cities boring, are busy breaking
the skulls of sparrows. The war ends
after eight summers. Both sides claim victory.
The news anchor marries rich, later hears the assassinated
president’s wife saying I don’t watch films anymore
before her extradition at the airport.
Both wear sunglasses. The first kid,
between drugs, buys ancient Chinese scrolls
and, with Cuban cigars, burns holes in them
that look like flowers. He can’t tell if the scrolls
are real, or fake, or half-fake, as if
the spy, having fallen in love, having done so many takes
to raise funds for his cause, can’t be sure
if it’s the student he loves, or the secret
of the future ex-president…
Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands (Milkweed Editions, 2024), selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and winner of the 2025 Levis Reading Prize. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Boulevard, The Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2026 Benjamin H. Danks Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
Selected by: Derrick Austin is the author of three poetry collections including This Elegance, forthcoming from Boa Editions in May 2026, Tenderness (Boa Editions, 2021), winner of the 2020 Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, and Trouble the Water (Boa Editions, 2016) selected by Mary Szybist for the A. Poulin Jr, Poetry Prize. Black Sand, his first chapbook, was published by Foundlings Press in 2022. His debut collection was honored as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and the Norma Faber First Book Award.
