--- Theodore Wei Changsheng

Malaga is a town high on a blue mountain overlooking a gorge. One cathedral is flagged like a maypole. 
That Chinese restaurant serves soft peanuts in tiny woks. All the other details are flattened like your box of 
Communist red and chunky taxi-yellow letters receding into it. There, I noticed someone patented Cezanne’s 
handwriting as a bitter font; it curls like cake icing. Forget about encountering some porcupine fanning its 
quills or cheese shoes with their stinky soles or any merry-go-uncle to string you rosaries of poppy seed or 
tablecloths with crabs of flint. Hang-gliding between those two mountains severe as constitutions, you can’t 
see the seaside cabanas, even from up here. A blind man has run himself off the cliff. It’s just as well no one 
believes in fortune cookies in Malaga the hilltop hideaway; we’re milder mannered leaving our tourist 
goodbyes on paper napkins, threadbare. It must be love whistling through the flower market.




This poem was inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Hunk of Skin, the first of the artist’s Spanish poems to be published. The 
poem was penned on 9 January 1959 at La Californie, Picasso’s villa in Cannes.