THE TREES ARE SENESCING, NOT DYING. YOU’RE DYING.

Has anyone been here long enough to love it?
Thirty-three years, and some days repeat already.
I come home and the mailbox is full again:

new credit cards promise liquidity, deals
I’ll love, do not discard me, hello neighbor,
has anyone been here long enough to love it?

On the train, I catch a rectangle of light
that moves like childhood. Branches quake outside
my first home. Even there, the mailbox is full again.

The paper says our presidents are so old
their deaths wouldn’t be a tragedy.
Has anyone been here long enough to love it?

How do you find the questions before
there are consequences to not answering them?
I come home and the mailbox is full again.

Everyone is full of it. I live with the consequences
of not answering them. Has anyone been here long
enough to love it? I come home and
I’m full and I’m full and I’m full.

Diana Cao's writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Graywolf Labs, The Yale Review, AGNI, and elsewhere. Her debut full-length collection, Slipstream, won the Berkshire Prize at Tupelo Press and is coming August 15, 2026. She is also the author of the chapbook Relational (Sixth Finch, 2024) and the acquisitions editor at Overheard Lit. She was Just Buffalo Literary Center’s 2024 Poetry Fellow, selected by Megan Fernandes, and the winner of the 2025 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. She has received support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Willapa Bay AiR.