intersubjectivity

24 Dec 2025 - Emily Zhou

1

What use might the entire universe have
For your bright young eyes
Tracing like abrasion
The point where my neck meets my chest
The hand in the pocket, the nervous gestures — I know you
In those streets without names
The simplicity crushing on me
What storybook schooners traced
What dustmote lines through satellite heaven,
What has been taken from every person
Before you and me face each other now
In the bar near the cemetery — the headlights
Rasping against surfaces, the night holding hands
With the promise of morning — your place
Or mine, the anecdote in bed later
Of three women holding you down
Like the Fates, calling you beautiful
As they draw out your threads, poised to cut. There’s
A photograph, like there always is,
Where you didn’t look exactly happy
But happiness pales in comparison. There’s a sense
In which we really are as bad as they say
They don’t get it of course but
We’re really there, the smiling agents of undoing
Who only undo each other
Expending wildly our inherited time
In the tide pools of history. There’s another
In which we’re huddled in the mountains, in plain sight
Waiting for the critical moment
To striate the sky with lessons
Like a meteor shower, speaking in one voice
Heavy with reason. Right now, though,
We aren’t looking at each other as you tell your story
The words worn smooth in the thing that we are making
Irreplaceable, elemental,
Easy to lose. Not the synecdoche, not the world,
But its patient and living mechanism
The spoke that carries the wheel
Too good to care where it goes \

2

Every moment is an opportunity,
Said the camera. Lower the frame
And the light is the same, but something
Has been removed from it, only to return
Like an estranged relative who doesn’t want money
But just to “talk.” In this one I’m sitting
On the roof of a building I used to live in with someone
And she’s there too, I’m in the middle
Of a sentence, more likely a fragment
Where the words have swerved off the track
Running into heaven. The sun has nearly
Stained us out. Stuck here forever, you could mistake me
For someone who’s miserable enough
But unaware of it, until some opening
Cut though my memory of frustrated nights
And repetitive mornings, and the sun
Pulled its needles through our bodies and into
The patient spindle eye. Oh, oh, oh I am a sad
Little creature, oh I’ve lived without hope
And here I am. Sometimes I wonder
If all my friends are more conscious of impermanence
Than I want to be, tracing the opaque surface of love
With their hands near their faces. They seem to be saying
We can hope only to leave something behind, as if
The project of a life is to decorate a crime scene
Waiting for our own shades to walk through the door
In detective hats, sympathetic scowls. No, the police
Will never be on our side. They will never
Find this picture, look it over, ask who was loved
Better by whose standards. No. The mechanism doesn’t
See, not exactly, it guesses. We’re the ones
Encumbered by vision, the thing is just a trap,
Clean and awful like the sun. She used to say
That I hid myself in plain sight. Whatever I am,
I’m not here. Like the state, you can get at the part of me
That talks, smiles, commits to words — not the part
That holds something back \

3

We don’t make anything. Leave that
To the statesmen, and whoever
Assembles chairs, cuts keys. Better yet — 
only God can create. Here in the city
Of mere responses to the originary miracle,
It’s all interiors and exteriors — I want
Something so much more. But you’re out there
In areas that don’t even have sidewalks
Communing with the dust and the ideas,
You’re out there tracing the beams
Of the practical life, thinking things like, I’ve got a new girl,
It’s not gonna work out. Now the sun
Is back, this time edging the lintels
Of a huge doorway, running up the color
Of the stream of time, as if to zero out
Our bodies, fade to black, as if to say
We’re only any good framing the gold
Excrescence of the sky, in turn washing
All the way out, everything tending
Toward the holy extremes. Day turns
Into night, now turns into
Never again, the image wavers
In the image of itself, you’re not here,
Neither am I, you were there,
You are no longer. Everyone feels as we do
About a summer evening, and maybe
No true feeling is original. I’ve been
Walking through the emptied streets, thinking
No one made this, that’s the mystery. We flatter ourselves
That we can take part in some part, trace a fit
Of color with the tracing machine,
Trace a hand with the hand in your mind, fit ourselves
To the energy ever pouring out, become somehow equal
To ourselves, don’t you have more
Than can ever be shown, and your face
Is so lucky, your voice even luckier, our visible parts
Can touch one another but our works
Like our bodies are made from nothing: the unread appendix
Of a book written blind
And never quite finished