Love Studies | Penny Wei
Woman & woman are friends & beyond lovers,
two birds on a string, perching on compassion,
clouds & a ghostly, timid eye before the branch
breaks and the women fall wingless into unsightly
cadence of flaming ants — arid, aggressive punctures
of what has been & what is left to be eaten.
Love is a red nail, red lip print, red blood stain until
red is nothing but romance born from a thousand
burning suns & their trembling sons —
women are of water & shades,
soft as feathered arrowheads.
I will climb on your body &
draw your soul with gritted teeth, buxism mourning
the eight-degree morning that rose before a fevered dawn:
I am loved & waiting to be loved. Always, eternally, indefinitely.
When a meteor rains its ash like breaking braids I will
cry & lure you to my embrace. In flying flowers &
rivering rocks we will shine like gold, shivering from
disastrous reliefs, dragging each other’s lips tirelessly
from ill, old romance.
If you believe in reincarnation, then a fetus to a grave
costs a millisecond & a hundred years —
both I will swaddle in grace & Yin Qi.
I am a woman & in every life I will be a woman,
prying at your affairs with damp eyes:
Don’t love the ginger who fed you apples /
Don’t love the nurse who injected you decaying bacterias /
Don’t love your mother / sister / teammate / high school sweetheart /
In every life, ambitiously, I will mouth you a command of love:
Love is the seed of my living & you the beak of an agrarian dove.
–
Yin Qi: feminine, receptive, lunar energy
Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She can be seen in West Trestle Review, Inlandia Journal and The Central Dissent: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality. She is the author of Her Other Fragile Inheritances (Glass Poetry Press, 2026) and Animism (Bottlecap Press, 2026).