The Roadless Travel aims to explore a liminal space between recollections and the events as they were, and projects a physical manifestation. It expands the two-dimensional concept of time to create a four-dimensional one, creating a universe that considers the possibility of time travelling along tangential lines. In it, the narrator possesses the authorial power to dive and swerve into all realities. The poem, ultimately, aims to alleviate the anxiety of time and its reductive power that renders three-dimensional people helpless.
The Roadless Travel by Sarah Ma Jing Yi
The Synchronism of Time Over Its Succession
Only I remain.
I step through the old-home’s quiet door,
To face squealing
silence.
The furniture has left only
the barest concept
of the place I’ve not forgotten.
Even the noon sunlight,
it shines not
on the crown of my head,
but encloses like a vortex.
The curtains,
the vein-white membranes,
exhale.
So much for death and its pervasive hand
that thrust a worm into my mother’s belly
and ate her
hollow.
The world shifts and only I remain.
I call out
of habit.
Tucked somewhere in the living
death-house,
my mother answers with my name.
Mother dear, mother dead.
Who’s mommy’s baby boy?I find her
encased in liveliness.
Her eyes are warm and
crumples me to the floor.
I’m in a dream and then I woke up.
The carcass trails her hands across my crown.
I look up to
see the belching wave
rot and fungi and worm
crawling up the side of
my arm.
The worm bites my flesh open
but my arm is still whole.
The world shifts and only I remain.
I look up,
see my mother
her eye sockets filled
with concern.
The world shifts and only I remain.
I shake my head heavy
with the dream.
I look up
see the curtains
Brushing the top of my head.
The world shifts and only I remain.
My fingernails bite my flesh open.
I want to go back.
The grandfather clock ticks backwards,
Unwound for decades,
I reach for the door handle and it sings
Who’s mommy’s baby
Boy?
My arm stings with the ozone of yester-seconds,
Prospective destiny.
The sun beats down my shoulder blades,
The doorknob shocks, glacial.
To choose one or
to choose the other or
choose not to choose or
choose—
All of them—
The world shifts and—