Desire and Drowning

(After Kim Addonizio)

give me your strongest rum,
aged fine and dizzyingly sharp.
i want it by the glass, bitter
surrendering to sweetness,
reminding me how in youth
i sought maturity.

give me the Chatelet les Halles,
the still standing Notre Dame, sunsets
by the river. the crinkle and collapse
of an 8am croissant, the quiet
in movement. in memory.
even in your 107 degree heat, i am still
in love with you. city or body,
what’s the difference?

i want your timbre with the tears,
your lips on mine the way
mochi donuts melt— glazed, airy.
what’s in a tongue except sweet talk,
the taste of passionfruit?
lilikoi,
you call it, hawaiian and fresh,
consuming my neck, my name,
all the languages between us,
swallowed into the night.

in moonlight, you’ll walk with me
after we’ve untangled and curled
back into our own skins. i’ll lead you
to the sea, and everything will be black
except the crashing of waves and glimmers of starlight
just on their crests. i’ll lean forward and linger,

losing myself to the lull of the ocean,
to a body kissing me so tenderly, so frantically,
that i can’t feel where i end
and the water begins.

Liwen Xu is a writer based in the SF Bay Area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Waxwing, Sine Theta Magazine, Mangrove Journal, and more. She is a graduate of the Tin House Summer Workshop and a fiction reader at The Rumpus. In her free time, she’s frequently running park trails, exploring new pockets of cities, and curating a haiku food Instagram @bon_appepoetry. You can find some of her work at liwen-xu.com or @liwendyxu on Twitter.