Love Poem – by Luoyang Chen

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A mere glimpse

at its bitterest.

We sit with our legs crossed.

I grip your feet in white socks, then rub

them, feeling the tiles between my dialectics.

Relax, heartbeats, and sitting still.

You smile at me and sniff my hair.

I wait until you buckle in to light a cigarette.

I feel embarrassed to introduce myself

as a poet. It is all memory now

in the loop of void, oblivion, and otherworld.

The literary will eventually turn your stomach.

But because I cannot continue this living I have

no other option. Past lives or 姻缘 as the distant moon

that once upon a time was close, so close. Don’t cry.

I light an incense. I light another cigarette.

It was intimacy.

I enjamb this.

Image: Amritanshu Sikdar - Unsplash


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Luoyang Chen

Luoyang Chen currently practices social work and writes poetry on the unceded Whadjuk Noongar Boodja. Luoyang is the author of Flow (Red River/Centre for Stories, 2023). They were born and raised in Fujian, China. Luoyang's poetic interests include the lyric "I", language, and the body.

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