Two poems by Jane Shi

... You and I / tried. We tried walking down a street once in fall. / It was night, half light, we found ourselves finding / ...

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"... Blood dripped down my chin. The light / left. After, I googled what it all meant—death, / capitalism, Steffie’s stuffed bunny ..."

"... I showed you / a video of faint sunsets dawning from / Ochil Hills, and my momentum when / travelling upward, against gravity ..."

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"... I remembered / the week the fireflies dissolved into crickets. / We'd just lived through the big thing ..."

"...vocabularies / reduced to virus, vaccine, variants— / that dull emergency of the daily count."

“a switch, a focus, and a temperament / suited to discovery…”

“The public air transmits / his days wirelessly / to my open window”

“It’s God’s day off, and mine too.”

“The pizza man ran over our pizzas!” He screamed, but no one believed him.

"...skinny dipping in a sea of potato chips / swaying like kelp past cookies..."

Pole, stretchers, ribs, and canopy.

“...it tells time / rapidly, then untells it back again”

A remote control to guide the grief in front of you.

It knows you could use a change of atmosphere.

With a closing line from Ted Hughes.

“You name each noise: Jackie chopping/ watermelon, Deb slurping from the hose,/ that neighbour’s fat Chihuahua.”

Keep your radio on—otherwise you might not make it home.

"Life’s a bomb on a timer."

“Now that we have all the right tools for the job, we can put them away for the last time.”

See the local sites, try the local kisses.

"'Drink up, Joe. Hell is closed.' / laughing out the side of his mouth / Killing me the rest of the way."

"My name is Bar, like the stool."

"My house is the smallest oldest little house on the block / neighbors tour over and look down / call the fire department."