Heartache & Loss

The gates, the gardens, the windows, the sky, the ledge of  bricks, the fallen leaves, the porch where…

By Aaron Shurin

to the tune “mu lan hua: magnolia”
 After tonight, what’s left of you is you

moving into my dream. Outside…

相离徒有相逢梦。门外马蹄尘已动。
怨歌留待醉时听，远⽬不堪空际送。

今宵风⽉知谁共。声咽琵琶槽上凤。
⼈⽣⽆物⽐多情，江⽔不深⼭不重。

I created more loss where I meant to make less.
Created more debt where I meant to make depth.
Created…

You’d never call the branches
arms, though in certain
lights don’t pine and man
look like hands

conjoined…

I’m in Shartlesville
Eating air-chilled wings in the sleeper cab
I took the contract because the devil…

By Xian Zhang

By Xian ZhangTr. by Shangyang Fang 

By Dan Beachy-Quick

By Sasha Pearl

Today everything
in this smoky love
seems false to me
from the two glazed pools of your eyes
      where…

If love be staunch, call mountains brittle
Love is a thing will live
So long, my dear,––oh, just the little
While water stays in a sieve.

Yea, love is deathless as the day
Whose death the stars reveal;
And love is loyal all the way,
If treachery...

and it ends, of course, in fabulous heartbreak, like anything—
it’s not an if, but when—so the trick …

There are so many things I’m not allowed to tell you.
      I touch myself, I dream.
Wearing your clothes…

By Mag Gabbert

The effect—for those three hundred years, while the cupid remained hidden—was a kind of silence.

Like…

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind,
child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you
do not break with…

We were ravaged             by our loss,                       our child.

                In the shower,                    slightly past midnight,

after I’d covered the …

I did not know it was possible (your constancy
being among your chief characteristics)

and I, bereft…