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Xiaole Zhan

Lanterns in the summer


When the air is bloodwarm and it reminds me of empathy.
When the stars welter like broken capillaries across my cheeks.
When the pomegranates are rotting, and the mosquitoes sound
like violas. When
it is becoming summer and I am
still alone. Always.
Always I am remembering somebody's eyelashes, and
how they are like a needle to my skin
when I have been untouched for a long time—
pain-swooning. Always I am
blooming
like a small bruise
on the inside of somebody’s arm
whose origin no-one can remember. Always
I am mourning
something I have yet to lose.
Anyways, I
would like to yearn only
as the moon is concave
and convex
to itself—
whole
and holding.
limbs as limbs,
no rhyme, no echo.
Oh,
the death of a dream is
sad like the body of a young deer.
When the air is bloodwarm and
the worms make a home in
the warm wet dark, glowing,
I think of lanterns in the summer.
Skyward they gather—
bodies, bodies, bodies

thAT YEAR, I WASN’T READY FOR THE SPRING


& on the roof

the moths were dropping dead all around us

flimsy & two-winged

flustered pinky promises

in the halloween-orange sky

in the carnivalesque heat &

while a rainbow lorikeet slammed into the glass

drunk on the bathwarm air

I wrote, to myself—

(remember it, please)

we spent the day gathering flowers

entire guillotines

of flowers in our own arms! we

threw them into the wind

& they fell

like joy or

a fountain in the rain &

I looked up at the sky

through your eyelashes

(remember it, please)

& I knew then that I was an arrow

& you were an open window &

that year, I wasn’t ready for the spring & I

knew then that we were disappearing

drops of water, catching

the light &

the changing light of seasons, then,

still caught my heart off-guard like

these words—

i’m sorry &

i miss you &

i love you

single-use, individually wrapped

for freshness, see

I wasn’t secure in the fact that

tomorrow followed tomorrow &

tomorrow &

sunset to sunset & sunset &

an arrow in empty air is only flight &

(remember it, please)

my heart is perennial, like cut grass in spring—

again & again &

also & also & also &

& & &


Xiaole Zhan is a Chinese-New Zealand writer and composer currently based in Naarm where they are completing their third year of university studies. They are the winner of the 2023 Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Their name in Chinese, 小乐, means ‘Little Happy’ but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.