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LAVINIA XU

Prodigy


                                                I grew up as an agnostic


                                                                                                      with atheist parents


who burnt incense when my poodle died.

                                                            He is a cherub guarding the celestial carousal,

feasting upon the crooked phantoms.

                                                   They canoodled me.

On the third day, his corpse would decay

                                                                                into loam quilting bamboo shoots.

                         I denied it, tears rolling down on my crinkling cheek.

 

                  On my first date, my girlfriend covered her mouth with a doily

                                              and coughed with elegance.

                           She suffocated on cologne slipping out of my cuffs.

                                                    I thought: Is her love


the divine scent of my cologne                         or                  carnal arrows of Cupid?

 

                                           In the zoo, I watched monkeys

meditating on prayers          

                                                 trapped in the mouth of

                                                                                   beggars hymning the rhythm of

                                                                                 coins striking against the asphalt.

 

I espied the moon through the telescope
–– 

                                                         there its goddess nurtured a sapling like a sperm,

which could not outgrow her desire beyond the Milky Way.

                                          She smuggled a boy
––a lost soul 

                                                                                             in naked spring flowers
––

& bathed in the lustre of stars. 




197  The Paris-American

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Lavinia Xu is a poet and undergraduate student in Ohio State University. She is a junior and is pursuing a duel degree in Logistics and English. Two of her poems, "Language of the Far End" and "A Summer Day Goes by the River," have been published in Mosaic, the art and literature magazine for undergraduate students at OSU. She currently lives in Columbus, Ohio.



  Next week's poet:

 Jeremy Allan HawkinsJJCCCACc 


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