The Arrogance of Days by Jeffrey Liao

after Lucille Clifton


The morning of your birthday, I take the C train downtown. Find your shadow

in every corner of this city: the dark geometry of skyscrapers, the curvature

of black birds. A man’s voice, tired as gravel, searches for your name–

for a brief moment, I mistake his longing for my own. Your name,

which has been made unspeakable by the clarity of your absence.

A name as mundane as rain, yet I cannot fathom the intimacy of its echo

attached to anyone else. You told me once that the beauty

of this city is that, yes, sorrow lives everywhere

but so does the joy. It is all around, congregating on the endless grid of streets,

its unsung teeth. I pass the vendor bicycling with his basket of oranges,

the woman rattling a cup of pennies by the subway, the owner and his dog

jogging past an impatient taxi and his horn. How so many stories

are contained in the singular axis of the body. Where are they all going,

I think, so fast I want to join them. I confess: I am trying to find

small joys in the brethren of ordinary people around me,

the vicissitudes of living, their weighted increments.

The first year without you, I confused your birthday for the day you died.

Sunlight glistened through the window while I silently wept.

Below, the crowd of pedestrians shuffled away from my view

and into their days. How arrogant, I thought, and yet–

with what grace–for the world to keep moving

while my grief stood still.

Jeffrey Liao is a writer based in New York City. His work appears or is forthcoming in Swamp Pink, Ninth Letter, and The Margins: Asian American Writers Workshop, among others. 

27 October 2025