These three poems by Vanessa Y. Niu seek love not as a possessive, but as geographies to enter and absorb: a Hong Kong nightclub, a Chinese lesbian bar, or a bridge by the river at night…
by: Vanessa Y. Niu
Streets of Mongkok / Dragon I
None of these people know
that I have a chicken wing
in my fanny pack. Nobody
including myself, knows that
I will later lose this pack
and my new leather Buddha wallet inside
during my first time at a Hong Kong
nightclub, too busy wanting
and being wanted
and loving being wanted
to notice people piling in
past the witching hour
and black holing my pack
and the dasique lipstick inside
out of this timeline.
A flash of neon. A beautiful body
part. Another segment.
To maximize the fun, I shove
receipts, night market trinkets,
food scraps, and a tequila shot glass
from the table into my bag,
and think of how I am everything
I ever wanted to be, how
I am just like every other girl my age.
I spill out in the form
of seven really horrible shots of
mystery alcohol
into the arms of random girls
& the linoleum floor.
I slip into rows of night-black peonies
blurring past in a shower
of street lamps,
& into the neon darkness
of club lighting.
Apparently You Don’t Just Meet People At Chinese Lesbian Bars
She leans over
a table of crystal beers
& crunches me open like a ripe mangosteen
with inquisitive, smiling eyes.
My white shirt stains with
my purple guts. She knows my want
which means she knows my desperation
which means this is the most humiliated
I will ever feel. Beneath
the mahogany table
I feel for her personal life
like lotus roots straining for
the bottom of a padded lake
to balance the stakes.
I ask all the taboo questions, like
What’s your name?
What did you do
before you started working here?
This American with trashy Chinese
is nosy. Over the 2010s English pop hits
alternating senselessly with Mando-EDM
thumping & vibrating around
the techy furnishings
pooled over with purple light
she’s barely comprehensible.
But she humors me.
Her hand slips warm with mine
& I lose another drinking game.
Gaze
Mm ba dada ba dada da… Can you tell
what I’m singing? On the bridge, lit by
the zig zagging reflections of lamplight
in the water, I know I barely look
like a person. Those second-gens,
he thinks, blood on their hands,
written in a bunch of gibberish,
and greedily claiming all of it. Clean
necks craning like odalisques.
He writes a poem in his head:
monkey-bud musk, Turkish rug rouge,
Chinese blue-on-porcelain skin,
and we’re by the canal
at tide-time. I play into it, look down,
stick my hip out, smile with my cheeks.
Jazz? He tries to casually put his hands
in his pockets, but he’s too careful about it
and it’s awkward. Is it jazz? He asks this
over and over again, whenever I hum.
The yellow lamplight catches his facial hair
ablaze in all the wrong places.
Mistakenly I ask him
which one he thinks it is, and he
rattles off all the standards he knows
How’s it not that one, how that’s
even possible. He keeps looking
and his arms are skinny. The water
muddies as the tide rushes.
His mouth wriggles into a smile
that leaves his eyes pulled downward,
a squid too far in the shallows.
Your hair’s blacker than the night.
I don’t correct him. I just look back,
match his eyes, half-closed.
Vanessa Y. Niu is a classical singer and writer with an interest in how cultural aesthetics and norms develop. She is the 2025-2026 New York State Youth Poet Laureate, and her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim, Teen Vogue, The Poetry Society, and NYFW. She is a first-generation student at Princeton University.
