No one sees you like no one does
In the century to give away our personalities
I keep my special relations quiet so I don’t give away too much
to the stone that bathes in its own persona
perverting the course of history
in the stony facts of life, this is not a present to mess with
it’s for bending over and eating our pretzels like we’re supposed to
walking into boom time after boom time in the future
sea doesn’t see our horrors, like gratuitous complements, but bends and straightens them
the stone is blurry when I look with my friends
the rest was all, yes
in the long sight across the centuries
there’s a lot of bad vision and recollection going on
thus, the stone waits for the next character
REALISM
The body is learning phenomena
tan tries to skin my errors of time
and there are errors in time
like when it fails to be a record of skin
look at all the people falling on the sidewalk
look at all the people with opal lips just missing the sky
when I spoke yesterday, I went on to
multiples. Ate looking for words and birds
mouthed the labels to make tables, speech is the flesh
mouth bought experience
mouth bought the red chair
for all that actuality I've been hunting the
broadening. In the broadening revolution
I've only seen, ever seen, your front door
there goes possibility
when the mind has enough blue light and just the right
amount of happiness, the turn in the sidewalk is entrepreneurship
sometimes amounting to REALISM on a sweatshirt. Swaddled in fleece
there goes an exploitable gap between confusion and the pavement
before the floor lamps get turned on and reading turns grey
actuality comes with a body
the table marks off resident speculation
the universe gladly accepts
returns, don’t let the 90-minute return window pass us by
like yesterday’s speech for the listeners
the skin speckled at the crease of info
the bright streetlights they switched over from warm light
couldn’t eat your words or the red chair
the day’s color blasted off, not much more may be done today
but tomorrow there is the fodder of the 24
clocks are telling us where to sit
where they say you don’t hear sirens
marching down the street towards better living communities
I am no slouch, the slight advantage in athletic socks does not matter in the end
wear them whenever. No end cap on the day, the world writes tomes
Tiffiniy Yingus Cheng writes poetry and makes experimental joke video art. Her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, received the 2026 Academy of American Poets Prize Honorable Mention, and was both a 2026 Tomaž Šalamun Prize finalist and a 2026 Poetry Society of America Chapbook finalist. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Poetry Quarterly, Oversound Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and is a Ngai mountain boat person but grew up in Massachusetts