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Little Elegy in G Minor

A box of Chopin nocturnes handed down from the other side of my mother's death-- evening gowns in trash bags making a little Golgotha of their own right in the corner of that studio we had spent all morning emptying out--uncandled cold chaperoned through the sill. Lullabies all of us had already heard while drinks kept going round the parlor after her wake assembled now into makeshift history--bits of tenderness discarded down the cosmos slide, each night a phantom limb, the hours trapezing over that sea of anonymous faces where sidereal glances scale up the piano's mirrored lid.

Timothy Liu

February 23, 2001

A box of Chopin nocturnes handed down from the other side of my mother’s death– evening gowns in trash bags making a little Golgotha of their own right in the corner of that studio we had spent all morning emptying out–uncandled cold chaperoned through the sill. Lullabies all of us had already heard while drinks kept going round the parlor after her wake assembled now into makeshift history–bits of tenderness discarded down the cosmos slide, each night a phantom limb, the hours trapezing over that sea of anonymous faces where sidereal glances scale up the piano’s mirrored lid.

Timothy Liu


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