LAVINIA XUProdigy
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 
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.
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Next week's poet:
Jeremy Allan Hawkins 
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