In this ongoing series, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, poet Paula Bohince chose A Few Ordinary Parallel Lines (2022–25), by Zhao Yao.
One pathway towards reading the works in Zhao Yao’s minimalist series is in their individual titles, which, if said aloud, turn the speaker into a pulp-fiction robot. Take, for example, 2024’s A Few Ordinary Parallel Lines 24.S.07_635224 13, 13, 14, 11, 12, 13, 12, 11, 11, 12; 11, 13, 13, 12, 11, 14, 12, 10, 11, 13; 13, 14, 11, 14, 13, 14, 9, 10, 9, 11; 11, 11, 12, 12, 12, 12, 11, 12, 12, 12; 9, 11, 13. How did you get on? Created in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic, the smallscale work arranges lines of crushed eggshell in horizontal stripes of subtle variations like terrain mapping. Are the digits code, a puzzle? Or just a few ordinary numbers for a few ordinary lines? Bohince’s poem reads between them, identifying something healing in systems.
An Entry
after Zhao Yao
Loops when snow becomes endless, and counting
the loops, loops become practice, decimals logged as list,
lists flowering into booklets. O healing
hertz nightly administered, zinc experiment, ostrich feather
encouraging lymph’s tremulous rivers. How
deserves sours, irrelevant as each lost person mounts
the same mountain, its summit
enveloping ecstatic aerials of some snow-
bird, and higher still an unfolded moon
cleansing a sill’s crystals. O quiet
of hospital prayer room or face by frosted glass
abstracted. Inlaid pearl won’t relent from bracelet,
not for bargaining, charity, nor aspect of wedding,
all the blankness between clasped by radioactive chatter.
One can be soothed by scissor and paper.
Zhao Yao’s A Few Ordinary Parallel Lines (2022–25) is on view in the 59th Carnegie International through 3 January 2027
Paula Bohince is a poet based in the US. She is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of four collections, most recently A Violence (Princeton, 2025).
