Picture three people in a car. They’re driving through snow-bound hills in Upstate New York. At the same time, they’re enmeshed by desire, love, and friendship. One of them is dying. And the holiday decorations this year are surprisingly sedate, except for that one house that’s really overdone it:
—Santa and his
sleigh drawn by a dozen reindeer
all lit-up, life-size. Should we get out
or keep driving? How can we manage
to steal that baby from its manger
without leaving tracks in the snow?
In “Last Christmas,” poet Timothy Liu tells a story of old loyalty and new longing with shimmering economy: three people, one car. That these human arrangements are dwarfed by the stark winter landscape doesn’t make the unstable structure of their love triangle any less dangerous.
As Timothy shares in our conversation about the poem in Multi-Verse Episode 12, one wrong word can see you left alone in the moonlight.
“Last Christmas” can be found in Timothy Liu's collection Down Low And Lowdown: Timothy Liu’s Bedside Bottom-Feeder Blues (Barrow Street Press, 2023).
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Multi-Verse is a poetry podcast hosted and produced by Evangeline Riddiford Graham. To hear more poets share and discuss the poems they don’t usually read aloud, subscribe to Multi-Verse on Substack, your podcast app, or to multiversepoetry.org.
Episode 12: Timothy Liu's love triangles