An Unwarned Dark Night

1 Minute Read Time

The shadow of two men holding hands on the concrete ground — Photo by Robert V. Ruggiero on Unsplash

This piece by Sun Tzu-ping is translated by Nicholas Wong


You both take your mutual assaults as lovemaking 
In the swift leaps of language
Weapons go soft like the vocal cord
When the city corrupts without warning you
It leaves no place for reconstruction or undoing

What follows is a grateful celebration
You remove the thorns and blades that gradually mature 
And take a modest and timid bow
One of you once spotted the other’s weakness 
And showed his mercy
An unwarned dark night
You hand in what you have: the last résumé 
You undress yourself
And take affectionate photos in the ravaged streets

Sun Tzu-ping

graduated from the Graduate Institute of Creative Writing and English Literature at National Dong Hwa University. He is currently an editor at the Liberty Times. Chinese titles by Sun include Knowing Shadows (essays; 2015), Sentimentalist (poetry; 2018) and Male Bodies (novel; 1998), among others.

A man with short, straight, black hair and brown eyes. He sits in front of a white background, wearing a patterned, blue-and-black jacket, a white undershirt, and black jeans

Nicholas Wong

is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), the winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me (Noemi Press, 2021). He is also the recipient of the Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Return to top of page

Search