Emily O Liu | verse for my therapist | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Emily O Liu is a Chinese American writer from San Diego currently based in Boston. She works in higher education and educational technology; previously, she studied learning sciences and technology at Stanford University and taught English in Taiwan through the Fulbright Program. Her work appears or is forthcoming in journals including Strange Horizons, No Tokens, and Lost Balloon, with nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She is interested in windows, languages, multiverses, and any of their combinations.

Emily O Liu's Website

Also by Emily O Liu: [time wrinkles] Being microcosms of the whole portrait of the 春 sea in 墾丁

July 2, 2025

Emily O Liu

verse for my therapist

take a walk, my therapist says, maybe call your brother, you are so insightful, so thoughtful. my therapist says and also my friend with some benefits. that’s not allowed for him to say, only her, to whom i rant my lack of belief in stability, continuity, self-worth, and all sorts of people and animals. horses, engraved with grief, birds in may, the month of my birth. who sees me, i think, lying flat down. at least on the inside. take a walk, is apparently the only thing i can do now, back to the beginning, which panics me when i am high, thinking about high school coalescing in what i believed a new land; returning to california, i discover northern is not north enough — dead friend’s siblings. trivia idols. next door neighbors. elementary crush’s ex. i don’t believe in coincidences anymore because everything is a coincidence. i want to tell the trivia idol i.e. benefit friend: even if you care, you will still leave me. which you know. and i know. but thanks for being honest. the days have been too bruised to lie any longer. so lie down flat at 9:24PM: drained, electrified. under the ceiling, fluorescence flattens me. my skin is sallow, so is my mother’s as she peels the loquats. in childhood, she set the wrinkled orange aside, they seem to be similar now. the skin and seed of a loquat, my own nowhere to be found: a father who claims he would never contact me again of his own accord, i ask, playing at therapist: who are you to speak of love? sire, who are you to deserve my respect? how much time do i have left with you? childhood dissolves, and in the next instant my hands will resemble my mother’s. firm, plump loquats — mother. crispy scallion pancakes — father. i still haven’t called my brother.

After two years away from the US, I returned from Taiwan to begin my graduate studies. I soon found that I could not leave behind any of my own histories. Paired with my first experience in therapy, I found myself thinking about lenses, loops, and how all of the details become muddled together. This poem began as an attempt at a zuihitsu for a poetry course, but soon morphed into couplets which nevertheless helped me make something of the strangeness — equally wonderful and isolating — that pervaded much of that year.