Two Stories About Drowning

After M. Ezra Zhang

                                          As a child, I refused to brush my hair

                              when it tangled in the wind.

                  I was an only child, so I pretended

                              the wind was a sister braiding

                                          her loneliness into mine.

This was my life.

I have left it now, I say,

                                                        as if I had never been inside it.

There were whole years

                                                        I was so lonely I

could not even describe myself.

             Loneliness describes a feeling

             the way a hand describes touch.

                         I’ve never looked like my mother,

                                     but the least I could’ve done for her

                   was look like someone else’s daughter.

I thought this once,

                                     meaning I thought this all my life.

                        I was a definition without a word.

                        I was lonely because I was alone—

No,

alone is not right.

                                                           The word alone exists.

S&M

You tell me that your favorite city is the one that’s least complicated for you.

You cite the men in Prague, the sex in Vienna,

the two of these being the same and entirely different,

like sex and fucking.

Like fucking or being fucked.

We are walking to the train

when we agree that cruelty is worse than evil,

that love is what makes cruelty unbearable.

You are leaving me, and I am watching you

until your distance can’t look at me any longer.

I walk away, and then I keep walking.

I pass the bent stop sign, the trees

slashed with light,

the birds whose names are gouged out by my unknowing.

             I knew nothing,

             and this too, was knowledge. That mercy

             is a consequence of power, and its contract

             with suffering, the end of it,

             is still what coheres me. That a distance is undermined

             when one thing is placed beside another,

             even if only in the mind,

             such that comparison becomes an act of romance.

             That if love is political, so too, is loneliness.

             That you, like the branch of a tree

             slashed with light,

             are gone.