Poetry: “Last Date” by Sharon Zhang

By Sharon Zhang | September 13, 2024

In Sharon Zhang’s “Last Date,” her speaker encounters love from all angles, in a sly merging of pregaming and praxis. The writing is quick and energetic, but Zhang’s fresh voice isn’t flip or glib; rather this speaker is quite rigorous in the ironic way they take on this concept as old as time: the mechanics and confusion and pain and beauty that all operate at once when one falls in love, particularly young and queer love. There’s charged awareness to this work, a tongue-in-cheek way that Zhang handles her own observations, which, clearly, she is delivering with a degree of humor, but the emotional meat of the poem is most obvious in the formal innovations she offers, her speaker’s raw obsession shown in the repetition and manipulation of spacing showing us in a technical way the depth and breath of her deeply held emotions and their implication in modern day, with regards to her contribution to queer theory and poetics.

Last Date

1.
if only it were so easy to forgo cynicism    regardless here i am
& nevertheless a poet yesterday i woke up had a cigarette or two
thought about texting some self-proclaimed sapphic on
some self-proclaimed dating app instead i complimented your
jawline wrote some shit on the ‘healing power’. of adoration &
yes!, the esoteric mania of love ! doesn’t
make for much longevity of interest , but sublimates my soul.   into
an australian type of leaving: melbourne, pre-winter, cold
and dry type of loneliness your absence is
everywhere i make space for you
in the grey areas where language is periphrastic and contrived
i put my poems on a pottery wheel i am going to make a bowl of
myself & become ready to receive the surplus arrowhead of love
which we call regret ready to explore the sillinesses of my
capacity predisposition into praxis there is something about this morning
this endless piecing of(f): love
as both an act of creation and t he opposite.

2.
yes!, the esoteric mania o f love ! periphrastic and contrived
everywhere i make some shit a cigarette or two
sublimates into space for you
an act of creation, i am nevertheless a self–proclaimed poet
everywhere i make periphrastic praxis
i am going to make a cold and dry
type of bowl which we call capacity & compliment your
cynicism here i am i am going to forgo
loneliness on a pottery wheel everywhere, i make

3.
melbourne, pre-winter, cold and dry
the surplus arrowhead of love
doesn’t make for much silliness
regardless

4.
become ready to receive mania in the pre-winter
of loneliness / your absence is
the opposite of(f) love | esoteric grey areas
everywhere

5.
adoration adoration adoration adoration adoration adoration
adoration adoration adoration adoration adoration
]adoration adoration adoration adoration adoration

6.
the ‘healing power’ of your jawline

7.
your love is
contrived cynicism

Sharon Zhang

Sharon Zhang is an author and poet from Melbourne, Australia. She writes on queer memory / your stupid situationship / English post-punk, but really -- it’s all about love. Her works can be found in Voiceworks, Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection, Mother Bird, was published last year with Fifth Wheel Press. In 2022, she was selected by the Poetry Society of the UK as a Foyle Young Poet. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prizes, Best of the Net, and Best New Poetry. In October, she is starting a BA in History at The University of Oxford.