love poem 1

smoggy today. it is march, but the world smells like autumn, like the cough of smoker gods, like the teeth of portals. in the morning, i bike over the fourth ring bridge and wish for a thaw. 

before you board your plane, i tell you to bring face masks, because my head is swimming with the stink of space heaters. then i laugh and marvel. how mundane. this time last year, we were too afraid to speak in anything but the profound. i send you theory. you reply with rumi: no strength but yours. soul of my soul of a hundred universes. this is when i tell my friends, i am in love, and my friends tell me, tell her. but i don’t tell you. instead, when i see you, i say, i’m not very good at this. it is the best kind of truth, because it is meant to spare you. 

you kiss me anyways.   

tonight, your plane will blink over russian airspace, because it is a chinese airline. it is the brightest thing, so i will see it easily. i will reach into the blue gauze of the sky and pull you down, matching birthmark pressed to matching birthmark. you were the one to notice them, twin petals curled on our thumbs. 

last autumn, a real autumn, i downed a bottle of plum wine and shouted cantonese karaoke at a chongqing sky. all of them love songs that my mother had loved. you were laughing, and i was on the verge of tears, because how would you ever know? how would i ever tell you?

you know the lyrics now. of course, i had confessed. of course, you had confessed right back. 

in the evening, i bike back over the fourth ring bridge and almost crash into a taxi. it is one of the many things that can go wrong before i see you again. that will leave one of us standing alone at the airport, dropping whatever is in our hands—roses, suitcase—to an earth that should carry us both. i choose not to worry. i will see you tomorrow. together in my apartment, we will turn on my space heater, and we will wait out the smoker gods. and i will tell you, and i will tell you, and i will tell you.

for asha, march 2025