by Ed Doerr Tian Zhang The fragrant ink of your blood, twisting in calligraphic strokes, writes a story in pavement: padding out here, in the quiet of night, to watch stars drop from the sky, hoping to catch the dust of one in your twitching whiskers. Once, I dreamed that desert roses sprouted through cracks in the plaster of my bare bedroom walls but wouldn’t dare divulge the intimacy of its meaning, so let me learn from that: your body passes untouched beneath the underside