ars poetica for the borrowed lights (after Ocean Vuong)

By Guest Writer Emma Wang

for a friend since childhood,
i count the days i mistook language for a skin.
i learned how distance stitches itself into a country.
three years, you said—— the way a moth insists
it was once a star. a girl on a rooftop dissolve into paper.
your syllables fold her legs into origami, crease by
crease; two commas paused in separate
sentences when the night, too, is a kind of ink.
my laugh a charcoal smudge and my voice
a punctured lung as we spoke in constellations,
building a museum with each word: a diorama
where I’m forever spilling light into a cup labeled poetry.
when you write Only, the O rounds at my ribs, the
vowels lit matches tossed at a fiction. love, I say
to you, lives in the mouth’s wet architecture.
so take me to Maryland, then down Jersey’s
summer. this is not a love poem. this is to say
i wish i could translate you into a language we both
understand. in my dream you are as translucent
as a mannequin swaying in the spotlight’s cold gaze,
its mouth a black hole eating the surface, its plastic
tongue the only body for intimacy you have ever
known until i take a pair of scissors
and snip the air into confetti.

this is a rumor the heart tells the hands. i press my ear to
the page and ask if the moon is ashamed to borrow its glow.
the stars are erasing their own names for in your version
we are always almost touching like two shadows
straining to sew themselves into a silhouette.
build a nest. learn to call it home.