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They have always loved one another cheek to cheek, their golden heads leaned together and conspiring smiles on young, smooth lips. Arm in arm they walk, hip to hip they stand.

One cannot love one’s reflection though it is there, and if one should hate it, there it still remains.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 04.30.2013 @ 5:23 am

When I was eighteen the NKVD came for us And I was eighteen and the floorboards had been in want of polishing and Father, gone for two weeks

this is not madness this is such fear

All that we do to each other.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 09.23.2012 @ 2:16 pm

If there had been anything more unnerving and disquieting, she thought that it was the tiny world inside each thin glass-and-plastic fairy-light on the christmas tree.

It had seemed like forever, like a lonely little corporate floor level in which someone, if they lived, would do so in pristine isolation for the rest of their days, fashionable and listless, entombed.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 07.17.2012 @ 2:49 am

There is something fleeting in this moment, beloved. The touch of your lips speaks of brevity, of late evenings and phrases unfinished.

(goodnight, ladies, goodnight, fair ladies, goodnight, goodnight)

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 06.12.2012 @ 4:44 pm

There, here, is rough-hewn wood, polished with Danish wax, with elbows

There is the warmth of strangers, here are afghans over tired couches.

Snow falls, dirty, humane, outside, lingers on cold windowsills.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 05.23.2012 @ 2:56 pm

There is a sort of art amongst the violence of it, the mud and the bodies; as if someone had decided one day to embrace surrealism whilst armed with all the misfortunes of a troubled past, perhaps too many Gothic novels, too much damned thinking-

Flanders in the springtime is not a holy place, nor remotely attractive in the year of 1917.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 05.20.2012 @ 1:18 am

He sat down at the writing-desk one morning, and found, much to his dismay, that nothing came to mind.

The day was fine; the smooth sunlight slotted through the windowpanes onto clean floorboards, illuminating dust-motes in the air, was warm, but the page remained resolutely, stubbornly blank.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 05.08.2012 @ 4:45 pm

There is a gap between us now like lovers across a river that becomes, gradually, a sea as you bend from me and I from you

What, I wonder, is there to lose when in all truth there is comfort in separation A productive quiet a welcome solitude Accustomed to your absence love, like a sickness accustomed to your silence when imagination renders you fonder, kinder you are not present and yet I love you still

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 05.02.2012 @ 4:46 pm

At boarding school, Jeremy used to stand with his back against the door of the wardrobe.

It had been a heavy, French armoire, the sort that seemed likely to fall over at any given moment- and so he and his roommate, a freckled boy with lean limbs and unruly hair and terrible Arithmetic, had been afraid that the thing would fall on them- crush them flat, or trap them within its yawning mouth of coatrack teeth- whenever they dared to get changed in the mornings or evenings.

And so one boy would always stand with their arms braced against the hewn-oak panels while the other rummaged.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 03.15.2012 @ 3:57 am

A dark-blue affair, speckled with white flowers

Rough cloth made smooth by wear, tired seams stains hidden conveniently nevertheless

Here we are Here is the kitchen

The dust-motes flicker, illuminated by dust

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 01.05.2012 @ 6:14 pm

There was lint in the spaces, the air thick with the smell of car-polish and a new, industrial sort of scent as if the trunk were the head, as if the car were an old dog, remembering past all else what it had been like to have been young, when the children were still scolded for marking the windows with their fingertips, when each new scratch had been met with regret, and not apathy.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 01.03.2012 @ 10:43 pm

There is monochromatic colour everywhere, and he no longer remembers which way to turn.

It’s not quite jaywalking; with his backpack and the last vestiges of tan over his cheekbones the city doesn’t yet suit him, too many countries of sheep and Sunday afternoons, battered cardboard signs that spell ‘Invercargil’ with one l to save printing space, like in the movie.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.29.2011 @ 10:09 pm

The halls whispered- ‘though still-unravished bride of quietness- with the curtains drawn back from the windows and the grounds outside, damp English weather.

Little more than veined torsos with sightless eyes and graceful shoulders, sexless from cheek to navel with their hair in curls, calcified.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.27.2011 @ 3:02 pm

The train station seems to freeze. Black shapes make up umbrellas and passersby in dark coats, the metallic sexless dictation of gate numbers and times sounds overhead.

You smile, a mess of laugh-lines and chapped lips.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.23.2011 @ 5:10 pm

This is something that is happening right now.

As we speak your time is trickling away from you in a way that the younger do not understand and the older do not care to remember, and you will look back to find this time both more difficult and easier than anything else you will ever have done.

Now. Calculus. Where were we?

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.22.2011 @ 11:47 am

Striped pajamas, the feet cut off the footie-bottoms even as she makes her way down the polished corridor with her fingernails like tiny shells, the miniscule motions of a eight-month-old scrap of humanity.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.19.2011 @ 3:06 am

It’s a lonely sort of life, cracks in the walls, monochromatic strips like foreign spy films at 10pm.

Her fingernails are perfect, the polish nevertheless chipped as she flips cards worn soft at the edges.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.18.2011 @ 1:47 am

Her face had been daubed with paint in red and white like lead, so that she dared not smile lest the thick wrinkles of it betray an age she did not feel.

The sceptre was smooth in her hand, her throne shaped- not that stylised, flat thing, but a real heart, obscene in its furrows of raw flesh.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.16.2011 @ 1:13 pm

He had found himself one day at the train station for no other reason than that he was walking past it, hat pulled down against the mocking Bedfordshire wind. He had sat, for the longest time, on the grimy seats painted over crudely in green, recalling the ghost-vestiges of smoke; a disappearing window; a slender, waving hand.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.15.2011 @ 6:45 pm

Tweetle parp parp

tweet screeeech.

Da-dum dum schhh!

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.14.2011 @ 3:37 pm

She was cold in a comical sort of way, shoulders hunched, shuffling, her words coming in ululating soprano pitch like a singer’s vibrato gone wrong, grinning nonetheless through aching teeth and steaming breath, laughing, hair caught under a knitted woollen cap in the Shenyang snow.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.12.2011 @ 11:14 am

I have never been entirely good with prints, always expecting the machines to do the work for me; cutting minuscule pieces out- no, not even cutting, chipping away at the half-giving mats with patterns that always seemed too much like wounds to be any amount of schoolroom-appropriate decorative, and yet turning out hopelessly benign.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.09.2011 @ 3:18 pm

He had created a mechanism, all brassy edges and fluttering wings, small parts delicate as a child’s fingernails. It had not flown, but all the same- all the same.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.08.2011 @ 4:59 pm

Autumn is fire, cool, dowered with empty leaves and the not-so-empty threat of colder days still. Leaves become skeletons, brittle but infested, Autumn wreathes her gowns with damp and decay beneath the facade of dry fire, warmth, the glory of trees in an endless park and walks forever steeped in romanticism.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.08.2011 @ 4:38 am

Cumbersome rubberthing they are, with their ridges like streamlined industry. Thick and yet yielding, giving up layer by later of bloodless flesh to miles, to roads, to distance.

And then replaced.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.05.2011 @ 3:28 pm

ti ta ti tati ti ti ro le ro

fingerprints within raindrops without

suburban Howick, Auckland, New Zealand greenery

te re re ro ri

go in peace

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.05.2011 @ 7:23 am

There is something to be said about silence, the dust motes, light on her pale sill, exactly

Twelve minutes of contemplation, where absolutely nothing was done.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.02.2011 @ 8:03 pm

This is not love.

This is such pain. Such pain, the heartless velvets and cruel, reckless pump of blood, hormones heedless of the slower ache of tragedy, sharper pains that they wreak with their hasty actions.

In a fit of anger we may break the mirror, the lingering regret of it (and the hairline scars) like stale perfume from a long-dead lover.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 11.01.2011 @ 1:04 am

She is red. She is the carnations in her glossy dark hair, dark eyes of indiscriminate colour, fingers slim or thick or small or long, curling in air, beckoning.

She traces patterns on worn hardwood floors, smiles, lips unpainted or painted, colour seeped into dry cracks.

She is imperfection, and yet.

And yet.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 10.31.2011 @ 3:46 pm

To do something without being prompted- instinctive, in a way, the mechanisms of our limbs and bones and flesh, our sinew and veins moving in smooth harmony, action startling and smooth as breathing, as if we’d always known how.

Posted By Tianwei Liu On 10.24.2011 @ 2:44 pm