Ting Lin
now it is summer and I still can’t eat much / on meds that make me shake for days / but i’m sprawled on your couch talking about tiny heartbreaks / willing some boy into obliteration / with the violence we used to claw at each other with / mouths hungry and mindless / how we’d wander through thick heat / stop at midnight fruit vendors / crowds suspended to the backdrop of cantopop from 1995 / before my cousin died from leukemia / saying hey hey hey / years ago you passed me that first cigarette / the ugly underbelly of desire / when we were teenage girls talking revolution / nostalgia as global art form / fatherlessness as philosophical condition / that recycling man who found your phone number sprawled on an old textbook and phoned you every night / then we excavated our hearts writhing between ribs / spit out venom with teeth / these past months apart I became versed in deprivation / baby I’m telling you about the first time I vomited under another city’s streetlight, that sandstorm from Mongolia, my imagined child in 2033 / humming yeah yeah yeah.
Ting Lin is a writer and poet from Guangzhou, China. Her poems have appeared in Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Banshee Lit and more. You can find her on twitter: @imtootiredfor.