bonding our sneakers / together through a fluid / no longer hers but shared

Distance blurred detail, so all that was visible / in the mysterious vapour were armloads of sparkle / he hauled as if from the sea

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I have never been hit by a car / that I could not see coming.

Two poems by Jane Shi

... You and I / tried. We tried walking down a street once in fall. / It was night, half light, we found ourselves finding / ...

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"... Blood dripped down my chin. The light / left. After, I googled what it all meant—death, / capitalism, Steffie’s stuffed bunny ..."

"... I showed you / a video of faint sunsets dawning from / Ochil Hills, and my momentum when / travelling upward, against gravity ..."

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"... I remembered / the week the fireflies dissolved into crickets. / We'd just lived through the big thing ..."

"...vocabularies / reduced to virus, vaccine, variants— / that dull emergency of the daily count."

“a switch, a focus, and a temperament / suited to discovery…”

“The public air transmits / his days wirelessly / to my open window”

“It’s God’s day off, and mine too.”

“The pizza man ran over our pizzas!” He screamed, but no one believed him.

"...skinny dipping in a sea of potato chips / swaying like kelp past cookies..."

“...it tells time / rapidly, then untells it back again”

Pole, stretchers, ribs, and canopy.

A remote control to guide the grief in front of you.

It knows you could use a change of atmosphere.

With a closing line from Ted Hughes.

“You name each noise: Jackie chopping/ watermelon, Deb slurping from the hose,/ that neighbour’s fat Chihuahua.”

Keep your radio on—otherwise you might not make it home.

"Life’s a bomb on a timer."

“Now that we have all the right tools for the job, we can put them away for the last time.”

See the local sites, try the local kisses.