by Emma Zhang
cherry sunsets glare off the side view window
a tattoo kiss on your arm, lingering in summer sweat and candied storms
like a dream bursting out of the socket of a movie film
playing in the background of your childhood —paris,
they tell you how to dream: baguettes and evening strolls
kissing under fairy lights as the city sleeps but you’re locked
in a song that’s not your own and the bells shake to mid morning
when it’s still dark/ when the sky is red like the swans dotting
the cityscape/ i want to live, you shout at the clouds: just let me live
and the paperboy throws another day at your feet and it is swollen
just beyond repair and the birds are singing so sharply like slicing dough
again and again into ribbons and each leaf is another person you left behind,
another person you could have been in loved with/could have confessed to
before the petals litter your verbena like a painting where the strokes
merge and swallow the canvas until every color subtracts from the last
yet someone takes it to the louvre and calls it innovation/ is pain a form of
creation/ broken bicycles dormant in the glass silhouette/ milk bottles rotting
in the gutter/ ripped newspapers stuffed back in the mailbox/ a comic in black and white
so diluted you can see the pages before it and the pages after it/ can’t read it at all but feel
twice the emotion/twice the fog and the broken branches and the notes lost
to the festival of empty squares/empty clocktowers/grey-blue pigeons/
give me a cigarette and tell me: are these subtle inconsistencies a home?
