Itinerary

There's no other way this story could be written when I picked

your name to decide how this world would happen. Manipulated

in the secondary text you invented for me, I stepped into the final

setting against the byline to get jet lagged. I am carrying your time

in my body as it relearns the journey of sleep. Surely there are exits

we have never been to, shuffling in the luggage claim,

shoed while we are not. They become brown, then horses-

there's no limit in verb tenses in this language you sneakily stufted

into my carry-on suitcase. It was heavier to bury into a plot of cabin

than I thought. It placed a mouth on your night you gave away

to my exposition. I failed to lift it on the mechanics of wings.

Why did we look up for something fallen? We took this day off

our skin, mine rubbed against more adjectives and yours

braver, open for more nouns that shouldn't be exciting. There

are gates and we mistake them for walls. There are walls we mistake

for hands. We touched base on these clammy surfaces. I unzipped

the next chapter and filled it with groceries hastily unpacked,

documents feeding on my finger movements. Here we defined

definition. They forget to print my throughlines. We celebrated the

not-happened. If you were awake, I'd just ask you to take me and take

a walk, wherever this line chooses to end.

Hanxue Jiang