And you have no materiality. Yet you exist, somehow, as a shelf in the library, a gacha
ball, or a cat in a box. A dictionary is filled with differences, what is not. And our
gap—backs turned—protects me from the sparks of downed powerlines, split wood.
Tired, admittedly, of beginning sentences with a name. A group of people huddled
outside of the McDonald’s on Wellesley and you are the air between them. Molecular
cloud, protostar. And because the stomach filled with Lanzhou noodles wants out of
plus and minus, you run into the water without a page or a snorkel.
Alex Deng is a Chinese-Canadian writer based in Toronto. He has appeared or is forthcoming in The Temz Review, Canadian Literature, Pinhole Poetry, La Piccioletta Barca and Reverie. Find him on instagram @allexdeng.li