New Writers Poetry Competition 2024 – Third Place

The Rotten Clementine

by Junxin Tang

The physics of affections mirrors the 
living of clementines. Glances fuse and 

evanesces the unripe, venture husk.
The sour is distant yearning, coveting

your tender fingers elegantly swim 
through the blonde or your gentle adieu

lacquering the air. Longing cannot bear
the hours, just as night cactus bloom at

night and die in mild
twilight. 

The ineffable will be sketched out in
blurred lines,

And heartwood burns when lines break
into voices in the flickers that permeate

the trunk of black birch. The fire is a waning
crescent curving on the spine, or an erotic chirp

woven with desire, that spills orange
hue to carpels. On moonlit nights we

no longer walk. Instead, our bare bodies
merge into one, your sugary lips sink into

me in scents of absinthe.

The acid aftertaste is our longing for 
more. Time pestled the pleasant hours

away as brief as the queen of the night.
It aches me, makes me

crave for a 29th of a languishing February. 
 
But the yellow flesh would go out
of season.

That night you told me you slept with Paris, and
I drowned in silence. I did not ask who or what is Paris

because I know you will say it is Elysium.
It’s where sex straddles an obligation, your

blossoms will flourish again in heaps of
dregs of our black birch. Time infuses its
 
ink to what weaves us together, and
black oozes would float above its sun-kissed
 
complexion. The evanescence and fragility of our
passions are bitterness in sour relish that trampled
 
the sweetness. Me and my fruit deserted,
soon to be the savor of flies in the reek of

summer rot.

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TBC.