L’Heure Bleue

Something is said. Other things are withheld. There’s a glass of lemonade, condensation rolling off the windows. A clock and a clause, the broken click of them. Everything needs to be rewritten in blue ink. The limits of a kiss under a play structure, hiding from the rain. Too humid. This, in the classical manner, would be considered leaving. The outward advance of wisteria. A paper bag intends to dance, a bottle breaks, piles of garbage. The correct citation is necessary, the right quote, an epigraph, but the author runs away with their sentences. Where shall I wander? Shifting, too anxious to be fully aware. Names of streets, parks, people. We were given a bunny to take care of for a month and a half, while a family friend went to Guangzhou. When he came back, it felt like he was taking my brother from me again, and from what I saw in the bunny’s eyes, I finally understood every poem, the low hum of a hundred pencils. But the glass is air, lemonade, anger, music. How do we fill the room with all of this? There will be birthdays tomorrow. Today the sun remains in the same place, the moment before it sets, a small streak of light between two high-rises. There can be elegies tomorrow. Today will be the artistic originality of rain hitting the bus window—little lines, babies crying, a crush mistaken for love, blue hours and sunsets from the stones overlooking the city, sore feet. I don’t know who the blue clerk is, where their wharf is, who writes these sentences. Three people are chatting across from me. There will always be. The other day I went to see the realignment of a permanent collection; abstraction had been demoted. Only when I was walking under the ashes with Fiona, seeing myself projected in a video game’s third person, my body looking at my own body, did I realize what I really wanted was to get rid of the first person. So I wrote with only lowercase “I”s for a few years, before learning that I could hide the first in the third, she said, twirling the steel rings on her fingers, but I eventually went back because it’s all I’ll ever have. Overheard speech. This room is filled with the wants and pronouns of other people that will never be contained, but still set in the traditional order of a sentence. The abandoned building with holes in the windows, concrete that looks like it has been crying. Rain falls backward toward the atmosphere. I never actually finish a book, I just read the middle few pages and reconstruct the rest using whatever is given to me. There’s a pedestrian crossing with no one waiting, turning from a red hand to a white silhouette every so often, which might be a form that contains something more original than anything I will ever write. A name trimmed with coloured ribbons. It was a Tuesday. Fiona was showing me these dry patches of skin from touching chlorine all day, part of her job. And there was this melody playing from the walls, so I knew something was wrong. I called my brother, but got only the molecules in the air, of the air. Fragments of sentences. They found his body pretty quickly. No study of syntax can replace affect, but it can help show you how the red-winged blackbird sings only pop songs. She was opening up to me, so she reached into the hole she had opened in her chest, and pulled out a handful of blue and purple glitter. I sought the abstract—rain, wind, the subway vibrating under the café—to fill my empty room, but I only spilled blue ink and found ballpoint pens, herbal tea. Aquamarine windows of the grocery store. In one blue minute, days shifting toward a slightly unmemorable taste, not enough salt, and this would be a form that no one has discovered yet. It’s 2 a.m. My phone’s wallpaper is deep black. Like the ocean. No, like the sky in December. This is what I mean, she said, when I tell you that this form is made from refrains of concrete, steel beams, measurements of force and velocity, and especially the tiny movements of muscle shifting while wearing a backpack. I only call when the stones on the street have meaning, but when they don’t, when I should call, I never do. Then she started to do some cartwheels on the grass, bits of glitter flying off her feet. This was when I realized that modifiers depend on nouns, that I’ll never be my own sentence. Green flash. Purple glitter. Abandoned building. Of, soft, stopping.

Alex Deng is a writer from Tkarón:to/Toronto. He has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, ROOTed Rhythm’s 2025 exhibition, Frozen Sea Poetry, and is forthcoming in Canadian Literature.