We are neither friend, nor enemy
because those could be metaphor
I might come to understand, something
made by diction, by definition or perhaps
by reference to a painting –
But I am boiling water at temperatures
too high for this tea, this bite
of York peppermint. Is your yearning
to regain control of my life why you
text me again, conjuring,
coursing through this cold milk, curdling
in these bubbles, popping bubbles of
sustenance once given by your breasts,
my breasts, guarding something
like wonder, part marvel,
which has grown remarkably small.
But you know this, this impossibility
of the heart, to be true, to grow smaller
than the size of my fist,
compressed into its molecular structures,
its protein engineering.
The spaces in between are vast capable containers
of iron and muscle, memory like the worm holes with
no measurable distances inside
the inside of galaxies. That is the location
of origin, where the power is
most ominous, where the code
forms the nucleus. I am
afraid of that peril and dumbfounded awe
for how much can be destroyed by her power.
I have seen it firsthand,
up close in the microscope.
I have experimented, as if I
can control it. I go to retreat in
the laboratory of poetry. But I know,
I know. For that genetic switch, there is
no undoing. It is her heart that is
within me. If I embrace it, something
will change in a way worse than death.
I will never imagine the suffering
of war, but I think I have by
reading the realists, the modernists,
by reading Thomas Mann.
But there will be no armistice
in the aftermath. There is never
an ending to The End of the Affair,
to The Lover. There are no odes,
no elegies. That part is correct.
Here nota bene for the record:
The tombstone lies, calling him “Beloved.”
The mushroom clouds are still
in the rainwater, just as you think,
slowly swallowing long steeps of tea.
Do I not know what I do?
because those could be metaphor
I might come to understand, something
made by diction, by definition or perhaps
by reference to a painting –
But I am boiling water at temperatures
too high for this tea, this bite
of York peppermint. Is your yearning
to regain control of my life why you
text me again, conjuring,
coursing through this cold milk, curdling
in these bubbles, popping bubbles of
sustenance once given by your breasts,
my breasts, guarding something
like wonder, part marvel,
which has grown remarkably small.
But you know this, this impossibility
of the heart, to be true, to grow smaller
than the size of my fist,
compressed into its molecular structures,
its protein engineering.
The spaces in between are vast capable containers
of iron and muscle, memory like the worm holes with
no measurable distances inside
the inside of galaxies. That is the location
of origin, where the power is
most ominous, where the code
forms the nucleus. I am
afraid of that peril and dumbfounded awe
for how much can be destroyed by her power.
I have seen it firsthand,
up close in the microscope.
I have experimented, as if I
can control it. I go to retreat in
the laboratory of poetry. But I know,
I know. For that genetic switch, there is
no undoing. It is her heart that is
within me. If I embrace it, something
will change in a way worse than death.
I will never imagine the suffering
of war, but I think I have by
reading the realists, the modernists,
by reading Thomas Mann.
But there will be no armistice
in the aftermath. There is never
an ending to The End of the Affair,
to The Lover. There are no odes,
no elegies. That part is correct.
Here nota bene for the record:
The tombstone lies, calling him “Beloved.”
The mushroom clouds are still
in the rainwater, just as you think,
slowly swallowing long steeps of tea.
Do I not know what I do?
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Georgia San Li is at work on poetry and other writing. Her work has appeared in, e.g., Blackbox Manifold (UK), Poet Lore, Heavy Feather, Osmosis (UK), Pembroke, and The Missouri Review. She is a two-time 2025 Pushcart Prize nominee and her poems were longlisted for the 2024 London Magazine Poetry Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 Oxford Poetry Prize. Her chapbook arrangement of Small Galaxies for Breakfast was a semifinalist for the 2024 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. She is the author of three chapbooks -- Wandering (FLP 2024), Periodic Elements (GTP 2025), and Intermezzo (Ravenna Press, forthcoming).
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