A F T E R
T H E
S T I L L N E S S,
B E F O R E
J A N E
T H E
( Q I H A N G )
S U N
L I A N G
This is it: in the mornings you forget half your words by the retching basin of a stranger’s house, syllables accumulated a lifetime ago tremble and collapse, hanging themselves to dry by the stasis of a night-chipped sky, worn out and briefly flickering in protest like second-hand neon lights within a fluorescent dawn. This is it: your life plays out like a run-on sentence of frantic meter and high-pitched letters, you remember how you lost your sentences between the chafe of ellipses between the cracks within the linoleum, but still the lost parentheses behind bloodshot eyes won’t dull or thaw from blind existence, won’t leak themselves a little history – a relatable apathy had fucked you on carpet, leaving you dry for days. This is it: you recollect the way your words slurred muddied and near insentient from your throat, a slow crawl towards evolution, as you beaded saliva and muscle to catch your vowels consonants in penny trickles you hear the coins beneath the dried up fountain of your ribcage desolated and hammering, burning under the twice-worn glare of an absent sun. 73