I came to know your country of castles on square streets between rivers into the haunted night as you speak, that’s the bridge we have to cross, past the snowy ground where we splash into water on the rocks escaping to the light by the bar and you take your gloves off your hands in wait for an answer. Will you stay with me in this land of forgetting and let the past burn like flies on our skin so that we no longer have to run but embrace each other in pain?

To give you an answer I burn my hair in your kitchen. You drop the pasta in the oven to spray me freeze me as you would attack an enemy for I have turned into Medusa screaming Leave me alone! before you can nail me to the wooden floor with your jealousy like yoghurt dripping between your fingers a suicide spreading—the Caribbean music cannot save the night. Our story is a dead soul swinging to music cutting into the night on your solitary walk your mind curls up against the snow against the passers by and their diluted hope. You know I will not be back.

You do not know freedom the way I do. Seven years spent waiting for the world to turn until you put on your suede jacket and hopped on your bike to ride to the book of poetry you show me. Never mind the dedication it was for Andrea for she had been there when I was not now it is for you. Pictures of life-sized puppets in a Japanese museum multiple yous and us down the lanes to dart to laugh to cry until we disappear into infinite traces. For you a man with a long crack down his chest vacant staring for me a girl in kimono her face unseen writing calligraphy on a hand scroll delicate determined. In soft lead pencil you wrote She’s a writer too.

-Nicolette Wong