I wonder what would be said if everyone who ever fell in love was as gifted with words as our poet here is. What stories we'd hear from those experiencing the headiness (or perhaps headlessness/heedlessness) of teenage love for the first time ? Or married couples whose flames of passion from yesteryears has since died down to a slowly but steadily burning ember ? What would your three poems be ?


Three Poems
For A Girl
Written by Nicholas Liu

The Grass Path

More tiring than the snaking
sidewalk ascent built for two is the
return with the ghost of a kiss but
sans company over mud
ants bruised leaves by the concrete downhill
through the humid girl-breathed air
on the grass path home.


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I Am Walking Outside Where It Is

Raining and the half-lit sky makes
everything blue
- the houses and trees and people and
yes, even the light pink flowers which
you commented on, decaying
pleasingly on the wet path - and
clad in cold and a too-thin shirt,
the world seems nothing like and full of you.



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Boat Quay

Why do you ask me
if I remember that evening spent
at Boat Quay? Sitting
on the cool stone bench
as the sun set
hands clasped, lungs filled
with the breath of the city:
of course I remember.


[later we stood on the light-lined bridge
bodies against the banister against
each other as we overlooked the water dark
as the sky with white reflections laughing
with more than our mouths we leaned out
over the black-coffee bay into the wall
of electroluminescene (i remember thinking
that the lights - so many lights - looked like bowls
of glowing porridge, food
from a post-apocalyptic fairy tale)
and dazzled by the light we shut our eyes
and kissed]

You know as well as I do
that the only thing about you that
I could possibly forget
is the shape of your face.