Her Withering Voice Locked Away in Twilight

Nothing holds.
Even the bone-white birch trembles into the name of something else—
each word a struck match, guttering
toward the mouth that splits it open.

I kept your voice like contraband,
sealed in the cellar of the sternum—
a half-step down and the whole season
hemorrhaged into rooms that didn’t know me.

The light was a lie we agreed to.
It moved because we were sick with motion,
or sick with stillness—your hand a specimen,
pinned, labeled, placed beneath the bright dissection.

Note: no distance is innocent.
Every void wears the jaw-shape of a face,
and absence is its own perfume—
heavy, clinging, sweeter for the rot beneath.

I have eaten the silence too.
It tasted of the thing it was not,
the way a beautiful woman tastes of grief
If you are paying attention.

To name you would be to finish you cleanly—
the way a fever breaks and leaves you
ordinary, blinking, standing in the kitchen,
a body with a body’s stupid needs.

You persist instead, like the blue hour
when the skyline turns its throat up to the dark
and everything desired becomes
more beautiful in preparation for perishing.

So I keep you at the lit edge of the periphery,
half-invented, ruinous, unresolved—
the love was never in the object.
It was always the wound. The want. A pulsing nerve exposed.

Yiniu Chen is a senior majoring in Cinema and Media Studies. Some of their current obsessions include looking for the original model for the Vinteuil Sonata, finishing watching all of Fassbinder’s films, browsing Upper West Side Zillow… and waiting for Trader Joe’s to restock their truffle cheese. You can follow Yiniu on Instagram here.