By morning light has grown crisp as apples but not tannin.

I have dwindled to a word in the mouth at this point, then nothing at all, not even the wind.

Recursive image: rabbit in the jaws of dog/rabbit in the jaws of god.

Fate? On my finger, a knotted string, still.

In Heaven it is back on Earth again: leaves fall low and bureaucrats plod in soft shoes.

Condolences? I am made a god, you see, made one.

First order of business: make buds erupt in that impossibly tender and downy way across the whole of the Middle Kingdom. Second: gossip with the pebbles by the lake.

Rabbit in the jaws of dog/rabbit in the jaws of god.

How to enact beauty out of terror.

Once I loved nobody, only the idea of somebody, only the idea of a body, I enclosed my love in the garden of my mind, I flowered madly as Osmanthus.

Somebody—

Whose frame, like night, expands outwardly, to the periphery of sight—

—

Andy Sia is a Chinese Bruneian poet. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi, where he is a John and Renée Grisham fellow and the senior editor of Yalobusha Review.