Poem of the Week | September 22, 2025

“Bedroom Confession” by Lyn Li Che is our Poem of the Week.

Lyn Li Che is from Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, Passages North, Sixth Finch, Los Angeles Review, the Best American Poetry blog, and others. She lives in New York City. Her website is lynliche.com.

BEDROOM CONFESSION

There are nights I worry that I’ve wasted my time on love

and not desire: those times I chose to pull the covers

over your feet instead of dancing, puking in gutters,

feeling up another man’s arms — neon above, hands above,

my whole life gleaming right in front of me (or part thereof).

Yeah, that’s dramatic, I know. But I’ve listened to the predator

in my chest and know what it knows: I am foreigner

to my touch and at home only in the exquisite gaze of

a stranger, the yellow fabric pilling on his football jersey.

At home, I spent hours agonizing over whether to follow him

on Instagram: my fingers hovering over his son’s brown curls,

his gym selfies. All this because he told me he liked curvy

girls, called me novia — not words you’ve used, not even synonyms.

The word you used: was it even love? Or silence? Blanket whirl?

Author’s Note

This poem is part of a longer series on love. I conceived this in a workshop with the inimitable Jon Sands: the prompt was to “think of a low-stakes choice you had to make that felt like it had higher stakes.” My mind wandered to the time I was agonizing over following a cute guy on Instagram even though I was in a steady relationship—Should I do it? Why? What was so wrong? What was the point?—and I used this as an entry point into thinking about desire. Reader, let me tell you—there is no faster way of getting over someone than by realizing that they like and post the worst memes.