Soul Deep

Please listen to this weary night

massaged by moonlight

please listen to the autumn wind

whispering to the blues mural

please listen to the whining sax

roaming down Silver City Road

please listen to the Love Train song

chugging out of the club

please listen to your heart

beating for the rhyme of dream

please listen to your soul

growing deep and strong

in the vast Delta land

rich with cotton and blues

Zheng

Jianqing Zheng’s poetry collections include The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville, 2023) and A Way of Looking (Silverfish, 2021), which won the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award. A recipient of the 2024 Mississippi Arts Commission poetry fellowship, Zheng recently published Garden: Poems, a poetry pamphlet after Eudora Welty’s photographs (Buttonhook Press, 2024).

dneQ: I’m acting under dn eQ pseudonym. I can draw with pencil on paper, do digital works and oil on canvas. I paint because the world has some rules that are incomprehensible to me I try to paint that incomprehensible. I drew for the first time when I was five years old. About two years later, I went to school, after which I entered university. During my university years, I forgot about drawing. But in my senior year I saw a film about an artist. After watching the film, art awakened in me again and I realized that I should start painting again. I started drawing on the papers I had at hand, even on the last pages of notebooks. I was almost always drawing, even during lessons. After graduation, take painting more seriously. Something was missing when I drew on paper. I decided to paint digitally. After a while I realized that digital painting is not enough. There was a lack of contact with nature. I wanted to feel the colors and their smell. I understood that it is necessary to switch to oil painting, now I paint with oil on canvas.