Phenomenology Study / Elegy for Island Love  

By STEPHANIE NIU 

The banana plant that thrashed outside my lover’s window  
seemed unreal. Our hours together felt like a dream:  
how he nudged a spider up the shower tile
with a cupped hand, unwilling to hurt anything  
alive. How unlike me, watching the slow turn  
of the ceiling fan, wondering whose stanza I’d slipped  
into. Once, I could see how badly he wanted me 
to say something honest. My constellation of facts  
could not parry his grief. The tide is low / The limes  
are ripe / I saw a cauliflower jellyfish today. The sea  
we shared, a surface I could not bear to speak past.  
I used my words. I wove a net of truth and cast it  
between us. And when it rained, I listened  
to the banana leaves, believing I could hear their color. 

 

 

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. She is the author of I Would Define the Sun, which won the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize, and chapbooks Survived By and She Has Dreamt Again of Water. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

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Phenomenology Study / Elegy for Island Love  

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