Nevada Wedding

My cousin said that getting married felt like a cartilage piercing,
it happens so quickly, and then you’re different. After the ceremony,
we drove through Valley of Fire State Park in their rented Chevrolet.
There was no fire, just the softest perianth of sunset –
peach and delphinium sky, nectarine crags, the comet of a plane
trailing into pure cirrus. I told you that to be in love is to notice.
Her husband moves for the bottle whenever her glass is empty
and neither of them told the officiant how they met.
I can be in love again of course,
with the eolian sand, pinkish in fresh exposures.

Hisarlik

Sure, I miss it. Smoking a cigarette on the porch,
listening to how you want to crawl inside
the New York girl’s bones. Her family runs a restaurant
in Arkansas, she’s spent years inside chest cavities,
she didn’t like that song about obsession. So maybe
she knows that love is archaeological, a wish
made upon dirt. You’re twenty-eight, and you
still think it’s German dynamite through Troy.
Kindness, by contrast, is forensic. Listen to this –
your soul is in the wind, and not the windows.
This is a carpenter bee, this is an ostrich, it is
Kant that you’re trying to refer to.

Sharon Du is a Han Chinese person who was raised on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are currently studying at Yale Law School. Their poetry has also appeared in Meanjin, West Trade Review, Poetry Online and Cordite Poetry Review. Their debut chapbook is forthcoming with Quarterly West.