Timothy Liu

How long will the bed that we made together hold us there? Your stubbled cheeks grazed my skin from evening to dawn, a cloud of scattered particles now, islands of shaving foam slowly spiraling down the drain, blood drops stippling the water pink as I kiss the back of your neck, our faces framed inside a medicine cabinet mirror. The blade of your hand carves a portal out of steam, the two of us like boys behind frosted glass who wave goodbye while a car shoves off into winter. All that went unnoticed till now — empty cups of coffee stacked up in the sink, the neighborhood kids up to their necks in mounds of autumn leaves. How months on a kitchen calendar drop like frozen flies, the flu season at its peak followed by a train of magic-markered xxx’s — nights we’d spend apart. Death must work that way, a string of long distance calls that only gets through to the sound of your voice on our machine, my heart’s mute confession screened out. How long before we turn away from flowers altogether, your blind hand reaching past our bedridden shoulders to hit that digital alarm at delayed intervals — till you shut it off completely.

She took the spareribs out of the oven and set them steaming on a plate before leaving her apartment. I didn't know how long to wait, tore into cold meat when I decided my mother wasn't coming back. * No one knew about the gun she kept in her purse until the authorities called—a .38 caliber pistol with a pearl handle and a trigger even she could easily pull— her car still waiting to be towed from a roadside ditch when they arrived on the scene. * Yesterday morning, I was leaning over a kitchen sink, my husband upstairs sleeping. Between his snores muffled under a down comforter and a portable electric heater that kept our bedroom warm, I knew I could sob as loud as I wanted without disturbing his dreams. * At the sports arena between musical acts and clouds of dope, I texted my lover a wide-angle shot of the stage— the reception bars on my phone bouncing back and forth between high and low—a text I had to send several times before it went through even though there was a chance his phone would be off or the text get lost for hours in the ether, even days. The silence is the agony. * My therapist says: It's not your fault. No way for you to have known exactly where your mother was headed. Then why am I left weeping in my kitchen decades after the fact? When I went upstairs and sat beside my husband, he could feel the mattress shift beneath our weight even though I felt much lighter after watching translucent ropes of snot lowering down into the sink, arms around me when I asked if he was awake, knowing that he wasn't. * How many romances get derailed when a text that has been sent fails to go through? How many mothers disappear through a kitchen door never to return—the food on the table the last meal they will ever serve? * My lover texted back: where are you now? Having no idea what I'd been going through when he texted again: Wish I was there with you.

—Wuxi, China Walking out of the new cemetery, my father takes my hand, having just re-interred the remains of his own father and his father's two wives— his mother dead from T.B. by the time he was ten. He takes my hand and says,Now I can die in peace even if we didn’t get the actual bones.

I was always afraid of the next card the psychic would turn over for us— Forgive me for not knowing how we were every card in the deck.

Slowing down your body enough to feel. Thought you were at a standstill but you were only slowing down enough to feel the pain. There are worse things than running to catch the train, twisting your ankle, the afternoon fucked. Running to get to or away from? the stranger who helps you up wants to know, you who are so used to anything scribbled on a prescription blank. Just want the pain to go away, you say, surprised to find yourself reaching for someone else's hand.