(FROM: Poems in between Carol rewatches)
Can’t stop watching you, Carol in bed at 12 a.m.
Can't stop myself from chasing you. Tall noses. Blue eyes blonde hair, picture of perfection ingrained in my brain. Can’t unlearn you, eurocentric tiktok perfect face filter
Golden ratios only exist on porcelain skin. To be you or be with you? That is the question I can’t stop thinking about, about the intersection of femininity and masculinity, Can’t seem to decide at which point do I push the push pin into, so I hover instead
Can’t forget when my mother said at the dinner table I’m worried about you, all
the boys at art school are gay. What do I even say to that? So I just
laughed & nodded, can't shake off the dread of having to come up with an actual answer
one day. Can’t wait to leave here, to the land of the free, so hurried I'm almost guilty.
New York with its rat races can’t faze me, although I will miss the tamer hustle & bustle of the MTRs, with their soft music at the braille maps & gentle footwork of pedestrians.
Can’t suppress the slips of the tongue, the English colonizing my speech
Piecing the pieces together like a ship of Theseus & I can’t help but ask myself:
How much of this still belongs to you? How much of this was yours to begin with?
On screen, the words are choked out: What use am I if I’m living against my own grain? Can’t fight against the current flooding my senses, star-spangled soft power Seizing me in a vice grip, gripped between its claws until stars spill from my eyes
Can’t pull away from you, a Christmas tradition-to-be with my friend, next time,
Next next time, the ending a fresh singe on my brain each next time it is revisited
& as the credits roll & the movie fades to black & I see in the dark reflection—
Flat nose. Brown eyes, black hair. Missed families, train rides,
red reunions, mother tongue, traffic lights,
kitchen steam, cigarette smoke,
yearning, yearning, yearning.
Izzy is a Chinese illustrator and comic artist, currently studying in the department of Illustration at SVA. Her works stem from the simultaneously comforting and terrifying notion of our interconnectedness within this wilting universe.