In this sky, heavy with storm,

we ride a phoenix to the heavens, I glimpse

your lips glistening with Dior’s stellar shine,

a tail, radiant as cruel supernovas, hydrogen;

elaborate as particle soup,

then your whisperings fall, phosphorescent,

delicate as song, on my lap.

Both you and our pinyin Phoenix,

are aristocrats of thunder, ring-fenced by fire,

You check your watch, set to the atomic clock.

(Elsewhere, a tick tocking clock would be the final remnant

of rational faith in a CERN-cold west

but here, in this stratocumulus,

we must suspend our disbelief and sip Keemun tea).

Each night, this flight resurrects me

from day’s grey cinders and night’s small deaths,

the ash syllables of our argument.

And with this rebirth my body becomes combustible

like our pinyin Phoenix,

on whom we could fly through gravitational mass,

undecompose the signed, unimplemented, peace proposal

or freeze again the Minshan snow that thawed like a thousand-year argument.

Let the jasmine bloom again from Guangtown soil,

we leave to fly toward the hydra supercluster.

Selina Whiteley (she/her) has been published in two books, “Up to Our Necks in It” and “The Kaleidoscope Chronicles” as well as in various magazines. Most recently, she was published in Literary Veganism and in The Lake. She will have two poems published in Neon Mariposa in May 2020.