The insomniac padding of a mother’s slippers strain yet amplify the nightly silence of a home. As poet JinJin Xu writes of the piece, “our desperation to be heard by the other, to hear the other” illuminates intimate scenes of a daughter’s imagination and a mother’s imagined presence. Playing with light and dark, glitching and cut offs, the poem gives physical rhythm to a self’s reaching for what does not/yet exist.

In this fifth installment of the Transpacific Literary Projects’s Slipper folio, JinJin Xu’s quiet poem echoes with the ritualistic footsteps of an absent presence and its untranslatable silence.

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