Aubade with River Styx
On summer mornings we crucify ourselves
in the tomb of our bed, the white linen sheets
draped like a shroud. We wake to a dawn
blooming & bruising our skin into ash, the
lazy hymn of light warming our nightmares into
miracle mirth. This is how I was taught to see
our sun: a cloak of hydrogen & helium stitched
by a thousand threads of fatality. Mama always
told me that everything begins in the east where
sunlight rises from the void in between silted
windows & dies on the beads of silver dream-
catchers knotted in the west. If what she claims
is true then even death can begin in the east,
its arms heavy with armored embrace, lips
smooth with sedative. Once I watched a bird
swallow another bird whole, beak piercing like
arrow & I wondered when moonlight would lay the
body to rest, forgive the crumpled anterior of
willing a sin onto itself. All this is to ask how
easily we fracture, never belonging to the shadows
we cast in our wake. We learn too often how to trade
aching for longing for survival, rinsing our names
in the earliest skies. This morning, a praiseworthy
aching. This life, longing. In this season of loss,
survival is funeral, sleeping in stillness.
Sappho in New Moon Dreams
In yesterday’s dream, we are sitting at the edge
of a pillar, hands folded perfect like European
queens at high tea. I watch your legs dangling
into mine, your limbs splayed against my arms
like time. Somewhere in the shadows of the
city, everything warbles in neon the way I
always imagined your eyes, violent with
corkscrew ribbons of skylight. I know you
too well. Like a sequence, the knife opens
the pale orbit of the moon, its blade carving
our names into new stars. I still remember
that first night under the abandoned highway;
All the signs reading like Sartre: No Exit, your
favorite play. We can’t do this anymore, you
say. I swallow your name like rainwater, gulping
the syllables into birdsong. With every apology, I
misfire. Together, we stitched the ovum of saturated
summer, fingers pressed like osmosis. I never had
the courage to tell you: I dream in color now.
Origin Myth for the End of the World
& maybe I was the foolish one for
thinking I could cheat death. Forgive
me, for in this life my only vocabulary
was volume, an excess of grief lulling
against the gun barreled down my throat;
I will admit: I am afraid of my body,
afraid of the curves & contours that
soften into newborn crescents beneath
the soil of my heirloom roots. For as long
as I have sought love, I faced loneliness;
no one told me love is simply an act of
sharing your loneliness with someone
else, anyone else. One day, I imagine my
broken body patching the sea with pebbles,
sinking the earth into sand. One day,
the pebbles will fill the waters forever
& I will drink to the end of the world.
One day, I will cheat death & wake up
in the afterlife after dusk, breathing.
***
Photograph of Serrina Zou by Vanya Vellore.
