Sophia Liu

Heartache

Already midnight. Rain pitter-patters through my cracked
window, moonlight spilling in. A quiet Rembrandt lighting.

With curtains closed, lightning sounds like the last coughs of
thunder. Too disheartening to be from heaven.

Anyways. You once said that religion is a man-made thing
and I told Mama that after her prayer meeting. She grumbled in the

hush of the evening sun. Outside, a shattering sound.
Maybe a man hurtling his last bottle of Heineken. Tonight,

it was a boyfriend dragging his girlfriend by her jacket sleeve as he told her
to just fucking chill. I watched them from my window and saw my father.

Already spring has changed out of winter fifteen times, but like the
dresses I try on alone, only the last two matter.

So you think the stars dance for everyone? Most flowers bloom and
unbloom, others unlucky. In January, their wilting faces

look as if they’re praying and I think that we’re not alone. I pick one and
tie it to your wrist. I finger their ripped petals, thinking of your hair

sprayed across the bathroom floor. I’d say to you that those haven’t prayed enough
as you begin to turn your head, but aren’t we all phototrophic?

I still count time as the highway exits. I’m still young enough to
expect another spring, another bud of lilac to grow between the porch bricks.

Now the fighting has ceased. The girl waits to be soaked as the boyfriend
closes himself into his car and the taillights desaturate. Another tear

in this black sky. & I wonder what the stars think, if they're laughing at all
the poets who write about God. If lightning is just their knee slaps to a horrible joke.

Rain: a quiet tapping, then noiseless if you let it be.
Like a heart, an accustomed half-aching.

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Sophia Liu lives in New York. Her poems and artwork appear or are forthcoming in the Perch, Storm Cellar, The Ekphrastic Review, Whispering Prairie Press, Underblong, opia and elsewhere. She has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the NCTE, Smith College and Hollins University. She wants a pet cat.