The fake bouquet wilts too

if you are away too long.

The news says Paris too

has a shortage of romance.

Too quiet, Bill Evans’ left hand arguing with the right.

They burned the city where we stayed as two

elopers who took the wrong flight, eager to

bear the stares, or rather, proud to.

People have grown to think too

little of their fathers, and too

much of themselves. In apartments built too

thin and empty. They write blasphemy in

an extinct birdsong, beating in twos.

It sings to my taxidermy heart, faithful and untrue—

once, we were tender things too.

The grocery store always sells peaches too

soft to survive the walk home. The moon, too,

is borrowed stale and thin.

We learn to love borrowed things too:

mom’s lipstick, writing on water, how we cry in cinema to

ourselves, how the check always comes too

soon, how strangers become cathedrals we return to.

Look at me, eyes plum red, say we are too

alive to be this afraid. Say the past is just another burnt city

if we want to.

Strike the match.

 

 

 

 

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SUI WANG is a writer of poetry and prose, and a social science researcher living bicoastally. She is a PhD candidate at University of Southern California. Her poems and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in HAD, wildscape literary journal, The Brussels Review, Pile Press, Contemporary Verse 2, and The Inflectionist Review.

 

 

The art that appears alongside this piece is “Magical Thinking” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.