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The Lindt Easter bunny
you said was “solid”
chocolate turned out
to be hollow—its head
caved in when I peeled
back the gold foil
which was probably
better left wrapped,
every language having
its own version of “beer
goggles.” Sometimes
I like your mouth best
when there’s nothing in it,
just two rows of teeth
surrounding a tongue
stunned into silence.
Copyright © 2018 Timothy Liu. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Tin House, Spring 2018.
Intermittent wet under cloud cover, dry where you are. All day this rain without you—so many planes above the cloud line carrying strangers either closer or farther away from one another while you and I remain grounded.
Hard to imagine getting anywhere near another semi- nude encounter down this concrete slab of interstate, the two of us all thumbs— white-throated swifts mating mid-flight instead of buckets of crispy wings thrown down hoi polloi— an army of mouths eager to feed left without any lasting sustenance. Best get down on all fours. Ease our noses past rear-end collisions wrapped around guardrails shaking loose their bolts while unseen choirs jacked on airwaves go on preaching loud and clear to every last pair of unrepentant ears—
whistles past hacked-down fields of corn, heading towards a boy who whittles an effigy of himself. We go on sleeping through sirens and crimson strobes flashing on remains no one can identify till we line up at dawn to see who's missing. At the zoo this morning, a girl found half-devoured in a moat, two lions licking their chops, Little Rock, Arkansas the only proof left on her body to show how far she was from home, a tattered copy of The Odyssey later found in her purse. Did she love her life?