What do I do with all this love I have for you? Nokyoung Xayasane
You’re standing in front of an open window, billowing curtains. The winter sun shining in and you turned to me, your back against the light. Stained glass window. Your back against the light. Reds and oranges and yellows and blues and greens, playing across the curtains and your face.
That evening, early morning actually, I awoke and found the indentation of your body in the bed beside me. For a moment I felt fear, a pinprick straight to the heart.
I found you standing beside the window again, the darkness before the rising sun, a dim world encased in the quiet pre-dawn sky. I was relieved to see you standing there, still there. I stood beside you and you turned to me.
“You can’t stop thinking about her.”
“I wish I could, but I can’t.”
We’re no longer hiding from each other, we’re beyond that. I’m relieved to see you still here; I thought maybe the worst had happened—that you had done the worst to yourself. I can’t help myself and reach out for your hand to make sure you’re still there, alive and breathing, short tortured breaths like a wounded animal.
“You love her.”
“I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
You have so many wishes right now. Wishing you didn’t, wishing you could. A world of wishes. I’m still riding the wave of relief to see you safely beside me, my pain at the fringes of it, the foam of pain on this wave of relief, keeping me afloat.
“You want to be with her.”
“Yes,” you say simply. No more wishes—just a statement of fact.
“What do I do with all this love I have for you?” I ask you.
“I’m sorry,” you say. The dark sky behind you. Your back against the darkness.
“You should leave before she wakes up.” Our daughter asleep in the other room. “If you don’t do it now, you’ll never do it.”
“I’m sorry,” you say again.
I see you now, walking away from the window, away from the house, down the road to our car, the headlights streak across the road. The headlights turn, casting beams of long light and then you’re gone.
What do I do with all this love I have for you? I write these words to you across space and time, making my way back to you. I love you. Nothing and no one has changed that.
You in technicolour, the white of the curtains, and moving shapes of colour across your face.
Here she was, waiting for him. She tried to see herself as others would. A woman, sitting at the bar, nursing a mocktail enhanced by an egg-white substitute. The bartender said it was made of peas, a vegan alternative. The vegan part didn’t do that much for her but she wanted to taste something different, a different texture, whilst drinking her slightly less expensive mocktail—some type of texture or flavour, something, anything.
She had arrived an hour late because of transit and yet he still wasn’t here yet. Traffic, he had said in his text. It made her feel better that she hadn’t been on time, waiting here for him, the minutes ticking away until an hour had passed by. She too was living her own life, busy enough and not-well-planned enough, to be a full hour late, and yet he had surpassed her here, still.
It was a trait he had. Did he swoop in and out? Or was that how she saw him? What are our ideas of people but mere fabrications, small slivers of who they really are, snapshots in time, solidified in glass, unchanging, unwavering even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
She sipped on her vegan mocktail and imagined sipping on warm tea brewed in his mom’s kitchen, from his mom’s teapot.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “I can’t find the teapot.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “If I were a teapot where would I be?”
“It’s not in the kitchen,” he said.
She thought for a moment. And then made her way to his mom’s bedroom. She grabbed the teapot from her bedside table. “Found it!”
She smiled. She had been so young. And now, a middle-aged woman with fleeting, moored memories from 16 years ago. Tea was the precursor before their podcast recording sessions. Edwin had come up with it for their university’s literary magazine. Co-hosts before everyone and their cousin had a podcast. At the time, it was new to her, almost nerdy, an old world, voices drifting on the air, unattached to bodies, ethereal. Little did she know, ephemeral would’ve been a better way to describe it. Short-lived, fleeting. But never gone.
They brewed the tea and brought it downstairs to the basement, into a room with a glassed door. His podcast station. She had never really participated in collaborative creative projects before. She was a poet who wrote solely on her own, for herself. Having someone read or hear her work seemed unimaginable, yet here she was, in their first podcast session, about to record her own voice.
She smiles now at the way he helped her feel at ease like a good director would—just natural conversation to take her mind off the recording. You felt at ease in his presence, safe. He was the teacher at school who believed in you despite what everyone else thought. He saw you.
One time he had said she was rare.
“If there was a graph that represented people,” he said. “There would be a cluster here in the lower left half. That’s everyone. And one lone dot in the upper right. All by itself. That’s you.”
She had scrunched up her face, unable to believe but wanting to, wanting to believe.
“An outlier,” he said. “You’re an outlier.”
Someone calling her rare. Well, you could say that was the beginning, and she hadn’t even known. Like she said, she was young, she hardly knew anything about life.
After the recording session, they went into the basement living space, past his bedroom. Light from the late afternoon filled the room, long bands of orange lasering their way to the brown couch. She doesn’t remember why or how but he sat on the couch and she on the floor, probably she felt comfortable there. And she rested her head on her arms which lay across the couch. She sat almost at his feet. The imagery. She chuckles now. What did they talk about? It seemed—everything. He was someone who was curious about everything, but mostly the arts and philosophy. An academic, really. Who wanted to remain in the ivory tower. Although this would change soon enough.
He would record his session later, and after their tea break, they would record the intro and outro. Later on, she would listen to that first podcast, over and over again. Her voice heavy with emotion as she read her poem. Their intro and outro, alive, like live wire. She felt like she needed to walk around her neighbourhood after that first listen, her voice on air, his voice on air, late afternoons on air.
Whatever happened to them afterwards, they existed there, frozen in time, floating on sound, wavelengths encased in time, unchanging, the beginning of something. They were on the verge of something. What it was she couldn’t name. But she felt it.
The door to the bar opened. The light of the late afternoon streamed in, bands of light across the mahogany of the bar.
He stepped in and scanned the room for her. An hour late. He raised his arms into the air, wingspan like a great bird, the initial movements before a great embrace—a gesture she loved. His smile, open mouthed and unabashed. She basked in his warm glow. She was sitting at his feet in his mom’s basement. “Something’s never change,” she whispered.
“What?” he asked, his arms still outstretched.
She walked towards him and entered his embrace, engulfed in his embrace. “Nothing,” she said.
not in exotic locales do I love you but at home, I love you
I turn the leaf of a page and you’re playing video games, mute on the couch sighs beside the humming air purifier, the daily air quality warnings we check the weather app and it says moderate so we sit on the balcony that will always overlook the park, a view untarnished
music plays nearby, acoustic guitar and falsetto tones and the quiet sounds of the street, cars and trucks stopping and going, air brakes, and bird chatter
I write poems in my Notes app about here and now and not there and the past about where we are and not where we’ve been Maybe I think about where we’ll go but not seriously and only languidly only barely
The long weekend beckons and I say to you, It’s you; you’re the one I say it in earnest and not as a joke, something new and pure The long weekend and this long life made short and fleeting unrolling like a map where I close my eyes and place my fingertip down Here, right here I open my eyes to see where my finger has landed and it’s where I’m supposed to be
I love you the quiet, everyday of you the quiet everyday of you I love you
the girl who was Thursday night, poetry by Nokyoung Xayasane and photography by Alina Chirila, published by Stone Garden Studios, $20 CAD + S&H.
the girl who was Thursday night, and the Italian translation, la ragazza che era Giovedì sera
It’s finally here! My second book of poetry, the girl who was Thursday night, has arrived! And it’s in English. The first publication of the book was translated into Italian for the launch at the University Library of Naples, which was in November of 2019. We’ll have a Canadian launch very soon! Please stay tuned. If you would like to order a copy or have any questions, please send me a message below.
You were standing by an open window,
your hand on the frame.
You were looking out onto the street,
the curtain billowing.
No witness but me.
You were walking in the afternoon sun,
just a memory in time.
And that memory of you,
it was safe to hold on to it.
I was standing by the subway door,
my hand on the frame.
I was looking out onto the street,
blurs of colours, yellow and blue.
No witness but you.
I was walking in the afternoon sun,
just a memory in time.
And that memory of me,
it was safe to hold on to it.
We were running down cobbled streets,
our laughter
like a thousand stars
exploding
in the sky.
No witness but us.
We were walking in the afternoon sun,
just a memory in time.
And that memory of us,
it was safe to hold on to it.
Somewhere you are laughing,
your hands moving though the air.
Somewhere you are running,
your legs blurred and strong.
I am smiling,
my face lit up, bright and free.
I am running,
my breath long and deep.
The curtains shift,
and you are standing there by the window.
I did love you,
but you knew that.
Nothing
and no one
changes that.
The doors open,
and I am standing by the subway opening.
I reach out for your hand,
your hand across space and time.
I feel the pressure of your palm
against mine.
I am walking along the subway platform,
my legs moving, my breath steady.
I see the opening of the subway exit,
and I make my way towards it.
And that memory of you,
it was safe
to let you go,
and that memory of me,
it was safe
to let me go.
Somewhere I am emerging
into the afternoon sun.
I am walking slowly
along the streets without you.
And that memory of us,
it was safe
to let us go.
Idleness is a gift
you give yourself,
I say
with a glass of rosé
in hand.
I want to write a poem
about justice and love and revolution,
you know,
those grand, unfathomable concepts.
Main concept: person, place, or thing.
Sub concept: politics.
But then I think
that poem is for someone else,
you know,
the spoken word artists
and the singer-songwriters
that hide power and the ties that bind
in their lyrics
about a late afternoon in Prague.
I want to write about Europe,
baroque architecture, grand sweeping phrases,
glittered and coating the balustrade of a golden staircase.
Main concept: person, place, or thing.
Sub concept: culture.
I wonder
if I don’t write about Berlin or London,
will it matter?
Locations don’t really move me
I find.
I have no feelings of sentimentality
for a broken wall someone else climbed over,
the steps of a museum where someone else
walked up and saw the afternoon light
bathing a dark haired man
who would become their lover, their enemy.
What I have is this—
Main concept: person, place, or thing.
Sub concept: boredom.
What are we but bored people
reaching out to each other?
Not even the drama of heartache
or treachery—betrayal—
no, just plain boredom.
And so I write nothing.
I feel neutral.
All signs pointing to a healthy mind
and an idle pen.
It’s the gift I give myself.
In the evening,
about around 8:30pm,
the sky transforms
into a landscape of pink,
touching the walled buildings,
blushing the trees billowing
in the summer heat.
The AC clicks on,
a swirling sound like the rivets
of steel of the subway tunnel,
the sound of something falling down the stairs,
a swirling wake in Hanlan’s Point.
There’s the pink sky in the evening
that purples into night fall,
that blooms into light
peeking and chirping with bird calls.
There’s this place, this street,
walking down Yonge
that hugs and presses against my skin,
the embrace of life and noise and sound,
the sound of giving up
and the sound of going on.
The morning reaches into the sky
following the line of a crane
hoisting a metal crate,
the building blocks of a condo
a skyscraper a home a business.
I said out loud, to no one in particular,
“I want to feel something
like really feel something.
Don’t you?”
And the sky and the trees, the birds,
they answered my call,
and they breathed and they laughed
and they whispered,
“Yes, I do. And I have. And you will, too.”
And the sky changed shape and coloured pink
reaching out to the edges of the city,
touching the cracks in the pavement
where a man and his dog sit
with a cardboard sign.
A man in a cowboy hat stands in front of the Chipotle
and watches passersby.
I want to feel something
like really feel something.
Don’t you?
history whispers
its quiet words
trumpets its war call into the air
and we are bystanders
beside a roadside accident
we are standing bare feet in grass
wondering about the stars
and global warming and North Korea
and how we’ll pay for all the weddings in our calendar
we are sitting on a fire escape
watching the world go by
and history whispers to us
but we are too busy
too busy being happy
In moving forward
I stop seeing the past everywhere
I look.
But the way some people move or speak
is a ghost of you,
is a ghost of them.
Before I fall asleep, lie my head down
in late afternoon, evening,
I think of them.
They are different people.
Some days I am sitting at the feet
of the philosopher and he is reading to me
the lines of a book, a pot of tea brewing.
Some days I am in our second apartment
and the musician bends over a turntable,
headphones on.
Sometimes I am lying in bed with the writer.
He stretches out his right arm and I sleep there.
He holds me even though he doesn’t love me
like I would like to be loved.
It is my tendency
to dwell on the past
as my present moves on
without me.
But I would like to make sense,
make meaning from these images:
those books, that turntable, an outstretched arm.
All I know is what has happened.
That’s all I know.
What has happened
shaped by hindsight and flawed memory.
What I know is
I loved them.
That’s the truth.
No matter how they may have felt about me,
I loved them.
I would’ve been with any one of them,
shared my life with them.
And I did with some,
some longer than others,
some deeper than others,
but I know it happened,
it was real.
Bird of Passage 