Vi Khi Nao

Circles

Last night the moon
Covers the mouth
Of the sun with
Her shy ethery hand
Pulled from earth’s shadow
As if atmospheric fucking
Is a sin
Overlapping each other
The sun & the moon,
Aching for transparency,
Are superengorged
Super enough to make
A sexual ambush seem like
Denial or a coconut bong
I long for my body to mourn into
Sound baked by wind
& compression
I long for the shape of your mouth
To renew its binary law
Though shifting away from
An orgasmic “O”
And, standing cum straight for the other
Binary “1”
There is transference
Where the moon’s shoulder is
Bent towards me
As if there is a rod of confection
Between her body and my mind
There is no despair between us
When her touch isn’t repairing
Your sun
We are both zeros or “O’s”
As you like to call it
Each year
When there is no anal eclipse
There is no anal eclipse
We are no binary lovers
The sun and I
The moon and you
We are a circle within a circle
A tongue inside a circumference
This is how dyke lovers
Do maths
In bed
A tongue inside a zero
Creating four infinities
Where lunar cunts and
Heliotropic breasts meet
We circle each other
Until a meteorite says
“No” to a series of zeros
We circle each other
Until a lunar sun
Says “yes” to a solar moon
We circle each other
Until the only
Circle left is the one
We left on each other’s body
Fading lightly away
From our center





Vi Khi Nao is the author of four poetry collections: Human Tetris (11:11 Press, 2019) Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018), Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), The Old Philosopher (winner of the Nightboat Prize for 2014), & of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2's Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize), the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016). Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. She is the current Fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute.