By Penny Wei

To see is to love: remembrance on an insomnia-infiltrated night 

1.nostalgia 

because you are a ripe grape too sour for the whiteness of my tongue 

and in silent nights you flay me apart with whispers of paper edges and stitch me back ajoint with golden needles spun from molten light. two years ago I asked why you always put your hair up and two years later I stand here, confessing. 

in heat waves and ends of your braid you press waterlogged lips 

to deaf earlobes, platonically. and pettishly, I scold you for sullying my rose earrings, my favorite ones. you laugh, your chin then wallowing in the apertures of my shoulders, like you’ve always belonged there. 

my hair will always be up for summer, you respond, 

as if that explains anything, as if I ever needed an answer. 

2.penetration 

visibility, is my translucent arteries from a heart, as to you I am mist-less. perhaps spin me. weave me into a green mirage. by river banks you sniff my strands of dyed hair, nose too close it dug into shallow shadows of my neck. intimacy, was poetry we 

never lost. but I question: have your roots stemmed into mine? you seem to be living off airborne glucose! if not aloof, if not strangers, then why is your core of such intangible, impalpable distance? saccharinity, seems just to be me nibbling on an apple’s bare skin. how intimate, if unpolished, sharp nails cannot even meet flesh? 

at dawn’s amber you tell me you like free, unbraided hair. in the morning, you brush gelled wisps of ebony back into braids. 

3. senses 

I confess: you smelt of sweet citrus, then crackling wood in the fireplace, then the ocean’s salt. in the laundry I fold I find the rubberband you lended me two years ago. I pause, and wear your rubberband on my hair. 

the first loop is thick, thawing snow; the second broken, dancing footsteps in twirling blues between rose elbows; the third is you rising from parchment, telling me that in Kazakh, love, can be translated as the ability to see,

and that you see me. only now, I have hair too brittle, so thin I loop the rubberband again, and again, until every strand is collected in a bun. december is too chilly for an exposed neck, so I mutter prayers for wet kisses and humid eyes. somewhere, I wait for you to untangle my hair 

into a River, flowing and tumbling free.