3,000 Year Love Confession by Angela Liu
20 lines
Issue 5 (Summer 2024)
The girl reads about ancient love
how on a moonlit bridge
a man once pledged himself to the river below
She tilts her head down and faces the world
the way she imagines he must have—
wingless, diving into his own shadow
Perspective is highlighting a line
written by a lover 2,000 years ago
Perspective is writing a letter
to ask forgiveness from the sun.
In a Shanghai café
the girl listens to city pop and
cries in the bathroom when the man does not come back
as a dragonfly.
In another thousand years
she will bloom on a desert during a heavy night rain
her petals open like arms
and the man will sprout wings
this time
his mouth finding hers in the dark.
Angela Liu is a Nebula- and Rhysling-nominated Chinese-American writer/poet from NYC who writes about intergenerational trauma and weird things. She formerly researched mixed reality storytelling at Keio University's Graduate School of Media Design in Japan. Her stories and poetry are published/forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Lightspeed, The Dark, khōréō, Small Wonders, among others. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela
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