by Qiang Meng
I think of Haruki Murakami’s romance novel
in which Watanabe loves Midori
“enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter.”
Never could I write such a line
that squats between us and something enormous like love
the way a moon eclipses the sun.
I see a cloud which you’d call the original draft
of clouds—found on the classic Windows XP wallpaper,
though to me it’s more like a lazy bunny’s butt.
Didn’t people watch clouds long before literacy?
Like the only two members of a dying book club,
we read Love in the Time of Cholera
when we were apart. Never agreed on what we saw.
The blue parchment of the sky, the steamship
propelled by a hollow flower.
Turning a page, I couldn’t help being shocked
by the shifting shapes of loss. If you were here,
I’d point overhead to a kitten’s silhouette
playing with a lopsided ball of yarn,
but hold on, it has two robotic arms!
You’d pout, like every time I vow to love you,
then talk about the Tyndall effect of light:
how the short wavelengths scatter
and warm colors could shine through.
About the Author
Qiang Meng grew up in Changchun, China. He is now in Atlanta, GA, and writes poetry in English as a second language. His poems have appeared in POETRY, Electric Literature, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere.