Sad Girl
It is Spotify Wrapped Season. Don’t hurt me is still on my playlist. I am lonely, I want
to love you more. I want to play Elmore James’s It Hurts Me Too aloud in my
bathroom as we did in that apartment near Erhai. Your fingers ran through the water
to touch my face, the small weight you lay on my eyelids when you told me every
song we love turns out to be blues. And how I was convinced love is a kindness only
to be failed: like all these endangered tropical butterflies whose heartbeat remains 9.8
hertz even when they are falling, whose death so tender must feel like a turn-down
jazz. Silent catastrophe is how you described the butterfly effect. I called it sad story.
It was a November night. I pulled off my jeans, wanting you to hold me again, not
knowing we were in a loss and that tomorrow there would be more names we no
longer speak of: Urumqi or Please Hurt Me No More. You were stroking my hair. You
were stroking until it turned into the darkest blue you had ever seen.
Shiyang Su is a Chinese poet. This poem is from her in-progress collection concerning the struggle, agony, and loss of recent years, intensified by COVID and frequent social and political upheavals. Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in San Pedro River Review, Blue Marble Review, Unbroken, Eunoia Review, Rattle, Passages North and others. She was nominated for Best New Poets 2022. She lives in Chengdu.