Mandy Chen

    Summer days we tasted summer air, elastic bulgy particles that not even mint-bearing breezes are obliged to drive from bothering, stuck close to your eyelids.

    I was a bit spoiled, I guess. I could never adjust my gaze to an angle of sweet touchable to tongue.

    August stopped by in a way neither of us expected hard-winded, boisterous, like the Thai spice we stumbled across straddling sleepless hours of black-and-white comedy.

    And through the heat and the steam of hot rice boiling, you would look at me with eyes naked of the universe. I know you nourish.

    Our shoulders crossed in new love.

    September you wondered why the monsoons kept hitting at you.

    I brought you dumplings filled with chocolate syrup that you said dripped into the atrium of your heart.

    It seemed that the ready sweat of my gaze had finally bordered the edge of your tongue and ate at you the way soap operas of an incomprehensible Spanish did, leaking the resolution of a colonial tyrant.

    When winter rolled around, draining blue out of the sky we colored sunless afternoons munching on chicken stew too overdone to be sweet, but still gave us toothache that wormed seeds into corrupted talk shows.

    And you could only feel with the melodious bittersweet of having to write on plastic that breaths take away words and leave them soaring on top of winds caged in the dead of liberty.

    We stopped eating in January.

    You left strawberry pies at the steps of my eyes, I kept spitting words that soared too high to be caught (leaving them to the indistinctive chatter some woman hollered from the depth of my kitchen television) through clouds of ornaments of branchless trees, leafless branches that breed no grass.