We sat cross-legged in a parking lot, facing each other like dying planets. Around us, men smoke – laughing at our open thighs. Look at how they stare at us. She said. This is the shape of a half moon.
I think they love us, because we’re willing to go beyond. This is a shape of a blood moon.
They take chunks out of our bodies. We'll count these losses in the next decade. This is a crescent moon.
Dumb stupid soul, and your illegitimate ways. Learn that light can grow stale. The clouds above us dictate who speaks, and who can be seen.
There's a parable against practicing sorcery and to what ends will we take, to make another’s soul glow. Tragic that we are the new age becoming, and how even God throws his head back when he laughs, I'd imagine.
This one collects eyes. Surviving by seeing people cry, and this is how a throne is made – so we wed these chairs at night, made of mock bedding.
In time, all beautiful things must end. Perhaps, it will be proven true that I am not beholden, or even a small woven jewel.
Beware, time is a food chain. And it never ends, this long and looming world. Maybe this is how all of life is, like a great sky passing over us, with everything alright at the end.
Even this turns over. The proof that stones die. This is that anthem, for what lies below the horizon line. Pillars of light erupt in California and Sydney sinks into a hole. Everything eventually comes crashing down.
Like all darkness and tenable fruit, or marrow, or everlasting truth.
Haolun Xu
Haolun Xu was born in Nanning, China. He immigrated to the United States in 1999 as a child. He was raised in central New Jersey and recently graduated from Rutgers University. His writing has appeared in New Ohio Review, Ruminate Magazine, and more. He currently reads for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review.
