She smells like marmalade
and Christmas trees.
She cuts her heart
where she places her knees.
She smokes in the park,
under the skating skies.
She makes me upset
and sometimes I make her cry.

Over in the dark,
she plays in the snow.
And if she feels cold,
I touch her chest
but I don't know.

Bask in the bark:
our names on a tree.
Carved with the knife
that she swung at me.

She says she's drowning in my ocean,
but I feel no emotion.

Her words suggest our bond
is as strong as a noose.
But she only loved me
when I was something to lose.

Rouge, threaded dragons intertwined with oriental cherries
stain a mockery of silk spread across an unsteady table.
The lady, dwarfed by the redwood counter,
has skin stretched taught across the bones of her temples
only to softly be drooped and draped around her jowls.
She caught both my eyes in the little dips of her palms
but wrinkles worked onto her face are focused on receipts
and she is obviously oblivious that her hands, veined with sickly blue,
had struck me so hard that my head is thudding numbly.
Her nails are narrow and naturally long,
set into the spotted skin of her delicate fingers,
pulling at a memory bathed in red by the Chinese lanterns
hanging over me, the couple near the kitchen and tiny Mrs Huang.
Her hands gesture to me after calling my order twice  
and I walk towards them to take the sterile, plastic packet
so that I can finally exit to the alley and spit into the gutter
a touch of an image much too familiar
to only belong to Mrs Huang.