Okay since I did a response poem below, if you haven’t heard of the amazing, beautiful poet Natalie Wang you have from me now, because she is absolutely ferocious with processing her thoughts/emotions into words that keep me up late at night like flash bangs of inspiration.
I recommend my friends from the bottom of my maiden heart – Y’all should be able to tell from my maiden post.
(after N. Wang’s ‘She Never Drinks Her Tea’)
Her house is personal in a way her Father
freeloads upon, paying rent by accusations.
She cannot hear her own footsteps over the
din, being unwelcome in her own house is
a swelling of feet, lights that refuse to work,
lao hua* glasses on a 20/20 past, one where
the tidiest living room has a worn-out tile
with edges that she cannot vacuum out,
where her calloused feet steps on blame
where a divorce must be a woman’s fault.
A headache upon trigger-happy migranes,
triggered by happy things from chocolate to ice.
For which, she was always brewing drinks
that were never her cup of tea. Drinks scalding
like a hot shower routine where she boils soap.
He was the pot that called her a black kettle;
The only black she sees is when sleeping it off,
dozing in bed with a Korean soap on an iPad
that distracts a scalding mouth, since tea
keeps her calm and awake in a nightmare.
*lao hua (“老花” in mandarin Chinese): Presbyopia
When you disappeared my thoughts
went along, grew cold and died.
Somewhere, there is half an automotive
from our last days, bruised, steam long lost.
The dirigible you used to escape yourself
has decommissioned. Even I stopped
purchasing recycled balloons – Nothing left
to fill what’s inside. The doomsday clock
exists for centuries, and i’d rather hear
the double ticks of your demise than no pop-ups.
But your mind was never uploaded, even when
people tired of a billion-year paradise, servers now
empty. Empty like the memory of your hair.
Space is warmer than your desertion, still
twinkling against the shapeless dunes where
we left off. I dance alone on these slopes,
kicking sand where every grain is possibility,
away from your spell to a dead end,
the terminus of your web of power struggles.
I dress the clouds that flow on my movements,
grasp the sky as my parasol, and stroll past our next lives.
If your blood is red Chinese heritage
why does it spill like everyone’s.
Do you call family, when they can’t
hear you burying your heart in pillows.
Embarrassment is the same color
as chatter as anger as weather.
No rain this week to wash away
questions; It is easier to sweep bad luck.
Does tradition imply and implore
speaking things people don’t mean, in a
language that expresses by choking throats.
How I look in my cheongsam speaks
hundreds of stories when there’s only one.
For people we care about, there are more
chances every day, than in a week.
Perfume that cries down your neck for you,
lipstick that will be erased without another’s.
Alcohol like water pools in your washroom,
contact lenses where no one gazes the color.
Dresses are a second skin to hug yourself,
shoes tread on pain to keep you on the ground.
Brush to sweep a face that reminisces bygones,
smartphone to illuminate organ spaces within.
Blues that fade into a solo tapping finger,
nights lost to a loss of words from searching.
I am in the ice, leaning against Ray Charles’
piano. The keys are monochrome and sharp,
within them a vacuum I must cross to
allow you to hear his fingers, the ones that
help me forget loneliness. He died before Voyager 1
found her courage to enter termination shock;
I told her that it was okay, your memory of Earth
golden among elder stars that have forgotten their
records. Like them, I have thrashed papyri to vinyls
to DNA storages to unlearn love, just to hear your
pulsar in my direction, a dense heartbeat in static.
Billions of years in songs of our destined galaxies,
but this coma eclipses my instruments to see the
creases of your slumber in the fabric of space-time.
Love is the entire Universe between pixels, where
i’ll miss you by millions of light years, just to find myself.
Mom claims she forgot, two decades without
touching a chopping board. But it’s still drying
up against the wall after being washed.
“Just buy frozen ones,” I pled, waking this morning
instead to find ingredients and flour painting the table,
filling the wrinkles of her hands. Eternal summers give us
less reason to handwash, too much like wringing sweat, but
the swept-back hair exposing her slick forehead is from
her habit of forgetting things and taking the long way.
It is the skins. Every fold pressed in has her going
back and forth. She loads in water chestnuts, mushrooms,
diced meat and the last of her morning. She serves them
in soup hot as the afternoon, still fresher than the memory when
I last had them at ten – it was night then, same ingredients
on a moldy board with fewer scars than her in Dad’s old house.
At least she remembers the recipe, and doesn’t need to return there.
Blood has a taste of metal, so perhaps we are
machines that need to love something to keep us
warm and red like evening sunsets that calm us after
a long day. Blue in the tropics mean too much heat like how
when skin turns blue we are cold and dying like the sea engulfing
our emotions and motivation to capture sunsets in the camera reel
fifteen minutes before our brain shuts down due to the lack of blood.
Blue skies can make us kneel when the sun finally has the weather to
punish us for staying indoors too much, to turn metal into furnaces which
boils our blood smelting love into hatred and cooking tears and sweat as twins.
Maybe this is why you now live somewhere colder – Not needing my coals; The summer stink.
Work tires me to no end but i’m pretty glad the skies weren’t too fuzzy tonight. I’m too exhausted to write poetry (although game for a little logging). Our most decorated satellite has been dolling up for a rare instance in her long flight in space, and her performance tonight reminded me of a song that went (in Japanese):
月にお願い
おだやかな影に薄化粧
…which roughly translates (I think?) to:
(Pleading) the Moon to
(Dress these) calm shadows in soft makeup
It goes without saying that the Moon’s sheer beauty is something to covet – But legends in humanity’s history have detailed people going insane simply by encompassing the true view of the Moon in their vision.
I did try, although I think I haven’t succeeded, yet (; ・・)ゞ
Lune L. 
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