The Ikea Café, Shanghai
Winter scene: brightly floodlit building site a socket between long, strong verticals— all the new high-rises barricading out light, a brick-built apartment block, red banners billowing down it—zhong guo, something ren, xiao, toy-townish forecourt, little privets in pots as night falls; as oblong windows pop awake, constellate; as the white lights of trucks whip along the speedway-on-stilts that spans the horizon where steel is strung taut between pylons way up from the streets’ crazy looping messes of wires—un-disentangleable black lacework crudded with demolition dust till deep darkness falls at last over the land and the geometry of tower blocks fades, turns toy-sized, twinkly, and here I am. Perhaps this whole thing’s been a stupid plan, this workaday Tuesday sipping coffee, tapping along to a pop song, church bells and robins a world away this Christmas Day in Ikea, Pudong, tissue stars twirling over the tills.
Sue Vickerman’s latest works include a translation of Twenty Poems by Kathrin Schmidt (Arc Publications, 2020), and a translation of It’s over. Don’t go there.: Short Stories by Kathrin Schmidt (Naked Eye Publishing, 2021). Her poem translations can be found in The Poetry Review (UK), Stockholm Review and nomansland. Her publications include five poetry collections, four works of fiction, and stories, articles and poems in The Guardian, The Times Educational Supplement, The Rialto, Stand, The North, Smiths Knoll, Mslexia and anthologies.
