I heard you sing an alphabet -
each kiss upon the page
brought forth a rhyme - they tasted of
funerial bouquets
 
We made our way through cardamom
weeds in the orange grove -
all while my memory’s future men
spat warnings not to rove -
 
and so I sat - in Alcatraz
as cucumber and salt
swelled in my mouth - no mercy as
my song came to a halt
 
I was betrothed once - to a fly -
who never stood me up
I’ve had tuberculosis since -
my time poured in a cup

we dreamt in lines of thin silk
and I traced you soft - in blood -
you sat me in a mangosteen
and said you’d be back - soon

I had a joy which fell into piles
though the birds were rigged against me,
I had the chance to become anyone.

I saw anger in your dazzled eyes
near the iced-over alley
Angels flew down, fangs creeping through their gums.
 
I lost my sock in the charcuterie board
stuck to a torn strip of your neck
When I licked it, the silkworms devoured the raspberries.
I helped the alarm sear corduroy in my memory.

You dipped a cookie in the sea
while mushrooms filled your footsteps.
that day you hacked 
a hole in my spine, 
bluelight scattered.
 
I had a trail of cream, lead 
from my nails to my hips
and hang me in your pomegranate shrine

Golden threads sink behind eyes
A marionette, diving from damp leaves
which crack my flats on the pavement.

Now rose-freckled, I’m reminded
of spackled nails on
shoulderblades

My cheeks tight, sun-roasted
heady from new sangria.
Your hair stings my face, swift as forgetting.

Soft-eyed and hard-hearted
I examine you examine her
crackling with charisma

Sinking in silence,
like mushed matcha coating an overpriced glass
her translucent hem spinning and spinning.

A letter came
before I left for Alishan
crumpled in one corner.
The imprint of your left hand.

Last year, autumn came early
thick with butterflies.
You liked to watch the swirl of leaves
as I swept the stoop.

The moss is embossed with footsteps
preserved by my slippers.
I hear your voice in the city
but it’s only the city.

In ’16, you showed me a letter
with pristine corners. The lace writing
called you to a land of floods and gorges
Here, the soil is pale.

Summer of ’15, asking myself questions
Why do I hold the pillar in a storm -
why do I climb the lookout?
I wanted our dust and ashes to be mingled forever.

It frightened me. In ’14, wed in Changan
we lost our names to each other.
Your voice, laced with warmth,
I dipped my head as if there were fences.

Remember how you rounded the bench
splattering plums like nothing
as I picked the naïve flowers
through eyes still curtained with bangs?

I wear my friends like a diadem
yours like a solar system
though somehow, they break the universal law
something glitched in the G
denatures it to P

In a tower defense game, you’d be
the princess, and i the net
of arrows, axes, lasers hotter than life
itself. Did you know my
lover designs lasers?

The sizzles in my neck are all the
more obvious for it. I
got my paper back today. At the top was
a name with my ego
cut to ribbons, beside.

I see someone and know they’re your friend
(Don’t have Sister’s condition
but my heart unknits itself anyway.) We
decay together each
time we improve ourselves.

They speak a name and it’s now a sheath
through which I see the point of
a nose, teeth change color, stacks of blood from your
sharp tear ducts. It’s fishnets
which look like chainmail. It’s

a lot of work perming my hair for
weeks at a time—sowing discourse
like a full-time job. Chaining myself to an
anonymous statue
is a lot of work. When

I wrapped my head like the foam around
a pear, my upper lip short-
ened to reveal my front teeth (the chip polished
porcelain,) it was a
lot of work. Breath in, breathe

out. She’s always a woman to me.
Tuberculosis, asthma,
paxlovid. You cannot sleep, there may be
princesses around. I
ought to smash this circlet.

Sure! We can do catering, I said,
As pools of ice met mine.
For the first time. I knew how it felt to be
a supernova, frozen in delay
a flower mid-she-loves-me-not
a pencil, whisking down
as Ms. Proctor hisses begin!

The first person to kiss me on the cheek
kept me up five hours playing cards
I never saw her again.

In my weekly trial expelling all my agony
“Are we there yet?”

Her eyelids shuttered open,
painted like roses,
like the glass they were.
Her builder cried with the relief of someone who
is finally fine not knowing what’s in store
except that she won’t find cockroaches in her
bedsheets anymore.

Stars
are easiest
to admire from afar.
I realize how they’re more gorgeous
through eyes engulfed in flames.

I cried every day for a month after that
it wasn’t like me.

“Am I still here?”
Oh, you pure fool
By now don’t you know
I hate melody.
I’d write dozens of songs
shatter bones of my thoughts
sift quicksand
to keep you.

There once was a beautiful princess
whose life was pretty boring.
At least her parents were alive.
Dark eyes and hair, hoodies, sweatpants, nondescript
she disliked crowds.

At first glance, she fell in love
with a girl in the mirror
with the moon in the water

though others said it seemed dangerous
bemoaned the lack of pictures
the weekly disappearances
of both the princess and of red-eyed victims.
But no matter – like in all stories,
it worked out.

The princess wanted
to spend hours admiring her lover through clear dark eyes,
and it was so.
She wanted change at a gradual clip
and it was not so.
She did not want to be evicted from the palace
yet it was so.

So she changed
her stomach became a cast iron furnace
her skin warm gossamer
her lashes copper curtains.
at 6.46pm, the clockwork train was an hour late.
There were whispers that she took its timekeeping to rebuild herself.
No one knew if she took a new name,
or wandered, subsisting on echoes.
Lungs don’t need motivation to breathe.

The moral of this story is love at first sight isn’t real.
But I wonder why so many people subsist on echoes?