Fissured Tongue Series

Two Poems:
What If Love Could be Found Sitting
in the Basement of a Bookstore?
After TImothy Liu, After Hafez
&
I Have Always Loved
by Carla Schick
​Fissured Tongue Series Vol VI  |  May 2025​

"Alone my gentle friend has left me" by Ann Wong WanYee. Oil on canvas, 70 x 50 cm, 2024

What If Love Could be Found Sitting in the Basement of a Bookstore?
After TImothy Liu, After Hafez

Sitting in bright
aisles   of a modern

bookstore    accented

speech stole
my tongue & I could

almost believe

in laughter   although I grieved
my face    distracted

in a scratched

mirror   a woman in a red skirt
captured me

in a poem
I continued to read

Such tender touches.

I have always loved

the ocean    Shifting

greens   tumbled   seaweed  blues    interlaced

with my tiny toes    perched in warm sand    anticipations

He said I could be anything    my father swinging   my body    out

​over   breaking waves     I wanted the moon     I wanted the flash

of night lights in an outfield where I could catch

whatever came my way    I wanted to be someone’s

hero     I loved the blues best      Billie Holiday said    I don’t sing the blues

the blues she left to Bessie      but I heard

and still hear her      a yearning



in her voice every time we played her records    My father sang

the blues   Smoked his blues   Drank his beer blues

Sweated his factory blues   But he knew how to swing

with Dizzy and Dinah   Nights at 52nd street bars

Gone blues   Gone   So I can never return the blues

My dad who taught me boxball on pebbled

cement    tipping my body over invisible

borders of despair     I dreamt in blues   Dressed

in grays and black and navy blue   Not the color you’d give

your girl baby   blues     Punch a hole

in the sky   My fist hitting that pink ball of grief

until tears poured from the clouds   turning the sky into

moving grays    And still I was blue    until my body became



wire and skeletal shades of bleached

bones     all I lost leaving behind words like stone trail markers

like a syntax that got my tongue-tied   chewing on the edge

of an erasure   where the voices

in my body hummed and shined like a birthing star

in a deep midnight sky    I never believed

​

in angels     until I could see

the Milky Way    one still night   far from city light

Vast universe of sky and stars and distant moving planets    A dusty

disk    A place to rest my heart   floating    taking me back

to the way I love

those turbulent
​
ocean blues.

I have always loved (mobile friendly )

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About the Author
Carla S. Schick is a queer nonbinary & Jewish activist-writer-educator. They have been active in Palestinian Solidarity work for over 40 years. Their works can be read in Colossus: Body Anthology, Querencia Press’ When We are Seeds, Sinister Wisdom, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Fourteen Hills, Qu, and beestung— reprinted in Verse Daily in Substack. Their writings breathe in the intersection of hope & resistance. They are forever grateful to the professors at Berkeley City College with whom they studied, earning a Certificate in Poetry.

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About the Work
"What If Love Could be Found Sitting in the Basement of a Bookstore?” was inspired by a poem by Timothy Liu, who was inspired by Hafez. During my adolescence I would sit in the basement of a bookstore on 5th Ave in New York and read poems, as though I were stealing words. I didn’t have the money to buy books and reading it in the bookstore seemed much more daring than going to the library (which I also did frequently). During this time I also grappled with the loneliness of being a queer, but not out, youth who found comfort in poetry and language. 

“I have always loved…” was begun in a poetry workshop with Emily Sernaker. It began as a meditation on the color blue, always one of my favorite colors, and the ocean. It points to struggles that go along with nonconforming gender expressions and being. It is also a tribute to my father who always believed in me in all aspects of my life. The ocean and my dad created spaces of joy for me. The poem is also a tribute to resilience amidst grief.  

About the Artist
Ann Wong WanYee obtained a BA in Visual Arts from Hong Kong Baptist University in 2020, and currently lives and works in Hong Kong and Sweden.

"I use different media to record and reflect on trifles in life. In my works, I explore the possibilities among media by duplicating, extracting, covering or simplifying individual elements and then combining them in a specific way." https://wanyeeann.com/ 
​
Wong's art piece, "The Thorns of Anxiety," is this volume's featured cover art. 

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