Word Fashion: Another Politically Correct Poem

 

According to Global Language Monitoring (2009), the following words

have appeared most frequently on flat and e/media over the past decade:

 

Global warming, with

9/11, before

Obama, through

Bailout, for

Evacuees, from

Derivatives, via

Google, behind

Surge, against

Chinglish, till

Tsunami

 

 

 

Glass Safe

 

There is a time

When engineers

Will make chips out of people’s spirits

As a hobby

 

Someone I used to know returns from then

 

I have seen her recently

 

But she knows me no more

Even after I told her who I am

 

“The spirits are installed onto various

Motherboards,” she explained

 

“They are all transparent

Kept in the same big glass safe.

But no one knows how to open it from within

Or whose spirits are whose.”

 

 

                                                      — Changming Yuan

 

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Changming Yuan, twice Pushcart nominee and author of Chansons of a Chinaman (2009) and Politics and Poetics (2009), who grew up in rural China and published several books before moving to Canada, holds a PhD in English, works as a tutor in Vancouver and has had poems appearing in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, Exquisite Corpse, Left Curve, London Magazine and more than 250 other literary publications worldwide.