he thinks it’s fine

halloumi Kebab hanging, dangling. burnt & crispy, our hearts. & he says (ah how old he looks),

but why, but why, we go down and down and descend into darkness Now that we become

nostalgic about a time almost a decade ago. o meek time. o time of the satiated. our supreme

leaders always smiling like great Buddhas. it’s almost like we are trapped in a sequence of toxic

relationships and we miss our last great ex who also beat us speechless oh yes they do that too

oh yes with a smile too so now we feel really really sad they are not here anymore. we miss a nice

beating with a nice smile. (i let my palm hover over the candle light) anger ruined us i say. we

were Fresher back then weren’t we. we had proper nostalgia. what is nostalgia he asks

Nostalgia: some mythical sentiment for an uncontaminated past before the process of

colonization; and

the fabrication of a collective identity to combat the unbearable present.

what is proper he asks

Proper: what we consider to be Capital

garlic aioli dripping as men continue to speak and garlic is as good as ten mothers and men are as

good as they claim to be

man B

but what’s wrong with being against atrocity??? there is nothing wrong with being against

atrocity!!!

man A

we can both agree that a book like that always has political consequences

man B

[] i don’t think that’s his intention

man A

he’s not against geneva conventions. he’s just saying there’s unintended consequences; but there

is

unintended consequences in his work as well.

man B

…suggesting,

implicitly, that

we should not care about cruelty.

men waving implicit flags

& repeatedly, what is at stake? what is at stake? kebab, i say. nobody hears me. one of the men

says so here’s a dimension to public policy and what i hear is a dementia to public policy. & then

the nostalgia for real music and real conversations. what is a real conversation one of the men

asks. i say well a real conversation is where you go places where you’ve never been with anyone.

man A

he’s a communist; i’m not a communist

man B

what i meant is it’s a very awkward position to be in they are trying to that’s the real imagination

being a mansion [?] means you have to cure communism you have to sort of play along that kind

of alternative imagination a poetic yearning a messiac yearning for a different future but at the

end of the day it is very awkward what’s that mean what’s that mean to be a leftist in post-war

contemporary germany it’s not a programmatic vision it pains me too it pains me too

& his eyelids battling the twitching of his veins but he refuses to close them. candles getting

louder

in london pubs like these we talk while old maps stare at us on the wall. maps produced and

mass-produced during the age of discovery already too too old so that whatever lessons they

tried to impart at a time already died with the people whose old flesh was sordidly eaten by war

and poverty and seasickness and Homesickness. & very soon, very soon. men will fall into pre-

meditated silence or play with their screens again and say, oh but shanghai, oh but shanghai. not

to mention that we are devoid of a future. & i hear my mother say again, i crave freedom. what is

happening now is they are attacking feminism again, extreme feminism. they are calling it the

cancer of our age. (& when we first met and had our first real conversation you asked me

whether i was a feminist. i don’t know i said, why. because if you are not a feminist then i could

buy you drinks you said.) the cancer of time is eating us away.

man B

juvenile welfare state. based on what? racism?

i never thought it would be this bad. i knew it would be bad but not this bad.

man A

i don’t know which is worse, i honestly don’t know.

man B

they are what they are doing.

man A

the sheer incompetence; it’s infuriating. the cruelty of this is already too much to bear, & we

know it’s cruel and we thought it’s at least competent.

we go places where nobody has been

it could not be anywhere else

we try to find our waiter. we walk in mazes of old chairs trying to find our waiter who we vaguely

remember to be someone good-looking and people flash us smiles of double meanings & tables

are turned & everything is upside down including our words and deeds & we have both hands in

our pockets. our incompetence is infuriating. i look at their faces & i can see anyone although we

can never live vicariously for others we still want to speak for them and that’s the hypocrisy

that’s the tragedy and the tragedy is our waiter can be anyone and still we cannot find him.

Sienna Liu’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Cotton Xenomorph, HAD, Lit 202 and Occulum. Her poetry chapbook Square was recently published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press. She currently lives and writes in London.