Vanessa Niu

unread notifications from: unknown number
 
at our root we must balance this
profound knowing (eyes meeting from
across the room, caught mid-laugh mid-joke
between separate conversations like a film
still, half a second of complete knowing--
i see you—i am being seen--the feeling that,
for half a second, each other’s laughs
mirrored as though through wormhole;
does it hurt? this being known? how
voraciously have we been waiting to simply
be looked at by another who understands
the universal immateriality—this flesh “or
other” substance clinging to the branching
of nerves reflecting the cosmic web in a
dust particle, who happened upon
consciousness as a child spotting an intact
shell in the oceanic debris of the beach--
how long have you been waiting, my friend?
my stranger? my captain my president my
sailer? to be home, whatever it
means? the i must know you never makes it
out of the tongue. aristotelian tragedy in
three acts; i see you, pass you, away.)
and this profound ignorance (the scent
of a stranger who walks past on the street,
i could know this smell, i could live or die
in it, lost in the exhaust fumes of rolling
engines. the holding of breaths as stranger
passes stranger captain sailor, who each
thinks of their exhausted loneliness
and in the pit of their stomach is
determined to think loneliness is the
byproduct of the aloneness of feeling. the
holding of breaths and tongues, i am not
seen. i am blind as cupid as colonizer upon
ancient soil. the forgetting of family and
the blooming branches of each mirroring
the cosmic web. each brandishing cosmic
immateriality like swollen tear glands like
unfurling sunflower petals beneath the
prophecy of explosion; i see you, pass you,
away.)



Raspberries (Ode)
 
We’re going to be making beds forever. Sitting
on chairs forever, at our desks forever and brushing
our teeth forever.
 
We could call it floating in existence
but it’s not quite floating. We will be tangible—not
forever, but for long enough—in that we can feel the
coolness of the seatbelt on a winter’s afternoon, and
that we can feel the burn of hot metal while warming
our soups.
 
And inside, the ache of missing someone
in the space between our heart and our outer chest,
heart beating like a hammer beating the piano string,
mechanical and losing heat and getting old. We’re
going to miss someone forever.
 
This traveling circus. The
yes, the world is a joke but it’s on mankind, but also
the we lived happily during the war. Picking raspberry
seeds out of our teeth forever, something’s caught
in our teeth forever,
 
whether the feeling that we’re
never going to see each other again when we parted
at the airport because bombs are going off forever or
the weather burning our skins off together, our news
anchor will compare acid rain and the Phlegethon
forever or
 
at least until the acid rain burns through
their broadcast station and It’s going to be political
forever. And we’re buying the groceries together and
the market is crashing forever and we say I love you
forever. We’ll be intangible forever after this period
of long enough
 
—in my mind, I am sitting beside you
at the coffee table, silently eating raspberries with you
forever, with this unnamed sadness between us that
is too monumental to
verbalize. You would never
be able to fully acknowledge that I feel it, never I you,
but in the back of our minds we know without the
other to carry the weight
 
we would never be able to
lift our heads and eat these raspberries. So we eat
them forever. It is a love language and a fear of the dark,
 
and in the meantime there is autumn forever
and thick picture book paper forever and Christmas
cards forever and Billie Holiday Billy Joel Billie Marten
 
forever and crisp linen, smooth wood, mint, piano
concertos, airplanes in the urban skyline and, and and
and raspberries forever.


 

Vanessa Y. Niu is a second generation Chinese-American poet and classical singer who lives in New York City. She has written text for the modern composition scene at Juilliard and Interlochen, and can be found at the opera house, a slam-poetry session, or attending open physics lectures when not writing.