Cathy Linh Che

You tell me, There aren't enough minutes
in a day to miss you. Dissolve
into a scene from Wong Kar Wai.

Clink of glasses. Two lovers pass
silently through rooms, desire locked away
in boxes labeled duty and fidelity.

One can go through life
as if carried along
on a subway train.

One can spin secrets like a web
and call it home. Catch prey
and call it sustenance.

The sky draining itself of light.
Your tongue a moisture
I won't taste until fall.

Until the leaves
flush into colors
like fire.

Did you know that my body
had been for so long
a construction site?

That men's hands worked
on me? See the blowtorch
and sparks.

See bootprints
in the fine dust
they never swept up.

And I like a maid,
bent over, and cleaning
with mottled rags.

They say that longing
is the distance between
what we want

and what we can have.

How I longed
for you in six strings,
in violins singing high,

then groaning low.

Your body I kissed into me.
Your body splayed under me
in a sheet of distant moonlight.