Ava Ye

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Pennsylvania Declaration

In April 1970, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology issued a statement at a UNESCO meeting declaring the museum would no longer acquire objects lacking clear provenance records. Though a pioneer in ethical museum collecting practices, the Penn Museum still retains and displays several artifacts of ambiguous collection histories.

E12326 Red Granite Sphinx

In a foreign place, many old things become faceless. I am unsure if I lost this body to worship or to grains of sand. Only that it is liminal, forced into the grandeur of welcome. That things are not better just because they are new, and that everything I touch, I slowly destroy. Still, I look for ways to recarve the stone. To put my head on the body of a beast. And to become an eternal protector, the names of those before me etched in my side, standing guard over many things that are not my own.

30-12-702 Ram in the Thicket

The only difference between a womb and a tomb is the gold and the cold, granular dirt. A pair of twins, torn prematurely from the ground and split between strangers, become misnomers. Expectations unfulfilled. If true sacrifice is distance, reunion is not worth dying for.

C395 Taizong Horse Relief (Saluzi)

I remember war like a father. Today is a forced departure with a fractured body, coated in purple dew like a bruise. An arrow, pierced through the breast: the price of loyalty, the grief of empire.

C681A Crystal Sphere

A lie, at the center of everything.

54-28-48 Votive Figurine

You taught me once: give to the fountain, but never take. We will never get our coins back from the god at the bottom of the well, who hoards our endless backlog of ungranted wishes. It is not enough to survive the pilgrimage. There is no reward for persistence, for what they cannot see. A cluster of votives, shaped from the same red terra cotta, blends into the mild landscape.

29-126-413 Silver Stater

A self-admittance of loss, minted in metal. We emerge from oceans like tortoises, desperately terrestrial, forgetting how our ancestors survived in the water. It is better this way: to be conquered is to be safe from freedom, to carry our homes on our backs, forever bound by the slow, violent wait.

Ava Ye/叶曳 was born in Hangzhou, China and grew up in Southern California. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, National Council of Teachers of English, The Adroit Journal, and the University of Pennsylvania. Ava is an Orison Books Best Spiritual Literature nominee and YoungArts winner. Her poetry is published in Stone Poetry Quarterly, Whale Road Review, The Penn Review, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere.