Blind
by Shin Yu Pai
Shin Yu Pai, Bird Blind, digital photograph, 2022. Courtesy of the author.
BLIND
SHIN YU PAI | OCT 2022 | ISSUE 19
in Arkansas, once,
I listened to a man
describe waiting for deer
inside a hideout
with a pre-teen girl,
the offspring
that he’d trained
to shoot, and kill
inside the evergreen
stained hut on stilts
perforated with rectangular
cut-outs, hunters looking
outwards at their prey
just bodies moving across
the landscape, a view cut up
like a butcher’s diagram
of meat parts: a leg, a head,
a velvet horn; years later,
in a Northwest shelter,
I spy a feather, a beak,
a birdsong while out
in nature with my own child
in a blind for birds rising
amid marsh and cattails
the building cut full
of apertures on the eastern
wall blinding my son
who covered his eyes
from sun gunned
through the portals
where we stood
in secret that we might
come closer to the wild,
catch sight of our own
primal natures, that errant
hope of flying free
Shin Yu Pai is an award-winning writer and visual artist based in Seattle. She is a 2022 Artist Trust Fellow and was shortlisted for a 2014 Stranger Genius in Literature. Shin Yu is the author of eleven books of poetry, including most recently Virga (Empty Bowl, 2021). From 2015 to 2017, she served as the fourth Poet Laureate of the City of Redmond. Her essays and nonfiction writing have appeared in Atlas Obscura, NY Times, Tricycle, YES! Magazine, The Rumpus, Seattle Met, Zocalo Public Square, Gastronomica, City Arts, The Stranger, South Seattle Emerald, , International Examiner, Ballard News-Tribune, Seattle’s Child, Seattle Globalist, and ParentMap. Shin Yu’s work has appeared in publications throughout the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan, The United Kingdom, and Canada. She is host, writer, and producer of The Blue Suit, a podcast for KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate. She is represented by Tyler Tsay at The Speakeasy Project.