I like her eyes.

Her gentle glance
Light brown, warm, and sparkled
With a lingering urge to cry

Focused
When she embroiders peonies
With silk threads on her scarf

I like only her eyes.

Not her lips, her tongue,
Her pearl-like teeth when she speaks
And demands an answer

A canny antique dealer
Brings me rings, lockets, brooches
But I want her eyes

A painter solves my problem.

Watercolor on ivory, a miniature
of her luminous right eye on my night stand
I make love to each tiny brushstroke

That could be washed away
By a drop of water
My spirit escapes, hands tired

My heart is too fragile to take a lover.

Elena Wu is an MFA candidate in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Her fiction and translation have appeared in The Popular Review at NYU Shanghai, and she is currently at work on a collection that explores diasporic grief and sensuality through inherited mythologies. Born in Nanjing, she is about to move to Rhode Island for pursuing an English PhD.