What makes our love imperfect keeps it real

In 2013, as my American-born Chinese husband and I neared our twentieth wedding anniversary, I looked up what the traditional gift for that anniversary is.

China! How could I not get humorous poetic mileage out of that?

I soon found out. The more I tinkered with the idea, the less lighthearted the resulting series of five sonnets became. It quickly went from Sappy City to Traumatown. And there it stayed for three years, because it took me that long to figure out how to take readers back to more cheerful territory.

Of course, it is generally inadvisable to wrap poems up with the tidy little bow of a moral, message, or conclusion. Instead of telling readers what to think or feel, poetry is supposed to leave room for readers to discover their own meanings in it, which might be different than what the author had in mind.

Still, I didn't want to publish these sonnets until I could bring the series to an unambiguously happy ending. I am sincerely besotted with my kind, funny, brilliant, athletic husband, and I wanted this series to be as unflinchingly honest about that sentimentality as it already was about our relationship's occasional “huh?” moments and disharmonies.

It took three years for the right inspiration to strike.

The finished series is still insufficiently celebratory for the occasion of a wedding anniversary, but I'm immensely fond of it anyway. I think its kooky specificity conveys something more universal about the complicated realities of successful long-term relationships—whose beauty, like that of porcelain china itself, is simultaneously durable and delicate.

I'll discuss three of those six sonnets below.

The first-written (although ordered fifth in the final series) leans into the initial inspiration of the China Anniversary, by containing a few phrases in Mandarin. Their meanings should be clear in context, but you can click the underlined links if you'd like to hear them pronounced.

Yes, I admit that “You had me at Hello!”—a line from the 1996 romantic comedy Jerry Maguire—is an anachronism in a poem set in 1991. I plead poetic license.

Sonnet 5 from the series "Sensory Integration"
I’d probably be fluent in it now,
two decades since your first impatient No.
You laughed, “What for? You had me at Hello!”
when I aspired to go beyond nĭ hăo.
I studied anyway, prepared to wow
you with wŏ ái ní. “What?” Wŏ ái ní. “Ohhhhhh!
I love you, too.” I’d seen your grimace, though.
I xiè xie-ed thanks. That’s all you would allow.
You begged me not to bother anymore.
I lacked your perfect pitch. I’d started late.
Your parents’ dialect was Shanghainese,
not Mandarin. A waste of time. “What for?”
you asked, bewildered. “We communicate.”
But when we don’t, I harbor thoughts like these.

• • •

Sonnet 4 from the series "Sensory Integration"
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” you complain,
resignedly. You know I always will.
You know my scream’s involuntary. Still,
your rushing past, my panic, your refrain—
“I wish you wouldn’t do that”—form a chain
reaction we’ll reiterate until
one of us is dead, and can’t fulfill
the damage-dance our reflexes ordain.
We both feel wronged, although it’s neither’s fault
that someone large, abruptly looming near,
sets off my decades-old PTSD.
It wounds you that the wounds of my assault
pop open when you suddenly appear;
it hurts me that you’re hurt by hurting me.

• • •

Based on “Tone Deaf” and “Insensitive” above, you may safely draw some conclusions about the other four sonnets.

First, the five senses are the organizing principle of this series, whose title is “Sensory Integration.” Since I am on the autistic spectrum, I am easily overwhelmed while trying to process sensory input, and this can sometimes be a source of disquiet between my loved ones and me.

Second, the sensory-related terms in the first five sonnets’ titles are commonly used as negative metaphors, as well as literally: “Color Blind” (sight/falsely self-proclaimed lack of racial prejudice), “Tasteless” (taste/lack of sophisticated style), “Imperceptive” (smell/lack of attentiveness), “Insensitive” (touch/lack of emotional intelligence) and “Tone Deaf” (hearing/lack of tact). Only the title of the final sonnet, “Extrasensory,” is entirely free of connotations of deficiency.

My less-than-idyllic emotional weather in March–June 2013, as I wrote the first five sonnets, was due to the fact that my husband and I were then living apart. For the first time in our twenty-year marriage, we would not be physically together for our wedding anniversary. And one of our two children was dying.

Our 16-year-old daughter and I were then living in an apartment near the University of California at Los Angeles, hoping her failing heart would last until a suitable donated organ became available for transplant. (This eventually happened in September 2013, thanks to a 23-year-old donor's generosity). Meanwhile, my husband was doing the single-parent thing with our 13-year-old daughter in San Diego, so that he could stay employed (and thus keep the all-important health insurance going).

Although our family reunited every weekend—and also had nightly video calls—I ached for the ordinary, everyday togetherness that my husband and I had shared before. I even missed our occasional miscommunications and sometimes-annoying quirks. The weird, “Why would anyone make that up?” aspects of our love story seemed precious proof that I hadn't made it up, and it hadn't all been a dream. At the same time, it felt safer to dwell on the less-than-perfect aspects of our relationship than to dwell on the perfectly happy stuff (which tended to make the pain of its loss more intense).

The series begins and ends in a more cheerful key, though. Here's the final sonnet:

Sonnet 6 from the series "Sensory Integration"
We make a normal couple only in
the sense that paranormal sure ain’t this.
Nothing magic happens when we kiss.
Or not to me. I’m not your psychic twin.
You see and touch and smell and taste my skin
while telling me you’re lost in lust’s abyss.
Asexual, I’ve never dreamed such bliss.
Our comedy of Eros makes us grin
and groan. But our proclivities and quirks
get honored, cherished—even celebrated—
by one another. I won’t ever feel
what you do, and vice versa. Yet it works.
Those famous, flawless matches? Overrated.
What makes our love imperfect keeps it real.

• • •

That last line is very similar to one of the repetends in my longest poem, “San Diego Psalms”: “Reality’s imperfect. This is real.”

That poem's 241 lines of blank verse were written and published (in The New Verse News) in June 2016. That line was what made me remember the 2013 five-senses sonnet series that I had abandoned because it had never felt finished to me, because I had finally realized what it had been missing. I quickly wrote a sixth sonnet, “Extrasensory,” and submitted the series for the December 2016 issue of The Able Muse Review, where it first appeared.

The full text of all six sonnets, with slight revisions, appears on my Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus Substack.

Cheers,

Julie

My publications since May 30:

• “On Her Portrait (Sonnet 145),” my translation from the Spanish of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, appeared in The Ekphrastic Review on May 30.

  • UPDATE—Did you catch Sor Juana cheering on the Mexican soccer team yesterday at the 2026 World Cup? Video here shows her wearing the same habit and nun’s shield shown in her portrait:

• “Curryelle” (a kyrielle) appeared in Lighten Up Online on June 1.

• “Rondelet-ed Reaction” (a rondelet, of course) and “Cassandra at the Open Mic” (a triolet series) appeared in Light on June 15.

• “The Catch” (a four-line ditty that I'd written for my Christmas cards about ten years ago) appeared in The Asses of Parnassus on June 24.

• Two epigrams on Michelangelo’s sculpture Night (translated from the Italian of Strozzi and Michelangelo, respectively, and answered with an epigram of my own) appeared in The Ekphrastic Review on June 30.

Forthcoming:

• Elsewhere: A Journal of Place has taken two sonnets for its “End of the World” issue.

• Blue Unicorn has accepted two triolets from my “One-Sided Argument” triolet series.

• The Brazen Head has accepted a three-sonnet series.

• On September 3, The Ekphrastic Review will reprint my sonnet “Topiary Outside the E.R.,” which had appeared on the American Arts Quarterly website for a few months in 2015, before the website was taken down forever. Hooray for second chances!

• In November, “The Death of the Cicada” (my translation of an alexandrine sonnet from the French of Maurice-Louis Faure) will appear in Issue 25 of Stanford University’s Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism, and Translation.