Blue
by Wenyi Xiao
You’d be surprised that I love Joni Mitchell now. Her album Blue. Thanks to you. You’d be surprised. But it’s too late. Too late to talk about Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen at the remodeled church cafe, to recite the lyrics and make up for our lack of understanding of life. In the dim bar, the glasses clinked and we already were wearing our apocalypse. We were so close that we couldn’t touch it. It’s always like this, one step behind. We learn the knowledge but can no longer apply. We die barehanded with only the knowledge. All paid up.
Wenyi Xiao is an emerging bilingual poet based in Beijing and a graduate student in English Literature. Her work appears in Wordweavers, TipTon Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, Prosetrics, Fresh Words: Voices Unbound—An Anthology of International Poetry, and others.