aphorisms for an aswang

"Moon" by Matthew Derouin

Nobody tells you adoration is asphalt
paving a road towards the future. Or at least
towards imagining it. Because to adore someone

means wanting to see them tomorrow. Relief
like a dove in your chest when you do.
Jenny Holzer said having two or three people

in love with you is like money in the bank
and maybe I’d invested once but no one
loves me now. So I guess I have no money

and no future. So what. Today I will dream
a person into being who in turn will dream me
into being tomorrow. For so long I failed

to want to picture any scene but pitch dark
like a sail unfurling always ahead of me.

About the author

Louie Leyson writes on the unceded ancestral territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Their work was awarded a CBC Literary Prize in Nonfiction and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and National Magazine Awards. They are the recipient of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts and hold a B.A. from the University of British Columbia. You can find their works in Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Account, Stonecoast Review, Plenitude, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. Their twitter is @aswangpoem.

About the artist

Matthew Derouin is an artist, musician, and author living in Saint Louis, Missouri. As a former student of philosophy, his work, across all media, is concerned primarily with questions of free will and the search for meaning. One's sense of personal identity is shaped in large part by a person's interpretation of the world, finding pattern, ascribing significance to experiences and events. These then affect one's world view, many of these things happen without awareness of the process or our own biases.