SURGING TIDE - Long Form

Rehash

5/27/2023

by Juliette Hagobian

My father snores like
the moonlight
   is clogging his throat, and I’m
afraid his crash will dispatch my own attrition.
We hung ourselves over the train tracks
   and forgot to
latch onto its steel skirt.
The noise of the night
is a man yelling
GOD BLESS AMERICA
   to the sidewalks with a voice
of longing. It’s midnight,
and my father has forgotten
what time the station dismisses the outside world.

      Dad we’re safe

crosses a blue streak on his phone
   like his irises
have slipped from the ledge.
      We left home for a discovery;
   a new way
      to let go of each other.
   1 AM. My world
is dizzied and desolate. Every limb
is a damp matchstick
   hopeless in the pockets of my jacket.
Eyelashes land
   in my palm and bite
at the hills of skin like
      a mosquito in heat.
The streetlights above me
trouble my eyesight
   and my heartbeat turns into the pattern
of our escape.
   A tragedy, this daughter.
      A half-sewn shirt
hanging off her shoulders like
the satin is ready to leap
   into the adjacent river.

The moon does not
dictate your life.
We’re going
to have a serious talk
about this when
we get home.

I throw stones at the wall
   and Emilia asks where I am. I’m
   spiraling
and a reverse rapture contorts
my torso.
   Even in this darkness,
I’m a disposition of my father’s hatred.
I am a pried contact lens
   left parched on the carpet.
My hands outstretch themselves until
the entire floor is ridged with paleness.
This building is a ghost town
      and I join the ones who wear
linen on their breasts. Whoever awaits
outside this dorm
is going to pour bleach
over my eyes
   and watch me squirm.
The edge of the world is now
   my bed. I lay still
and watch the ceiling
   bend in regret.
I am
      barren like
   an infertile mother.
We are all cut-up
snowflakes displayed on our parent’s fridge
waiting
      to ricochet after
   the tape dries.
My father and I fatigue on different sides
of the street and wait
      for the sun
to ruffle in the sky.

      I’m sorry I lied
   I’ll explain in the morning

You’re dead to me.

Juliette Hagobian (she/her) is an eighteen-year-old poet and writer from Los Angeles, California. She has been published or is forthcoming in Filter Coffee Zine, h-pem, Corporeal, and The Howl. She works as a poetry/prose editor for Kalopsia Literary. Juliette is a 2023 poetry mentee of the Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship Program. She loves fruit-flavored gum and will beat you in a game of Just Dance. Find her on Twitter as @jjules_h.

Back to: Issue Nine

Next: Anay Agarwal

SOBRIETY SONGS

5/21/2023

by Alia Hussain Vancrown

Alia Hussain Vancrown is a poet, writer, and editor. Her poetry has appeared in RHINO Poetry, Palette Poetry, Court Green, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Alia has a bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing and English with a concentration in Poetry from Southern New Hampshire University. She resides with her husband in Montgomery Village, Maryland. aliahussainvancrown.com

Back to: Issue Nine

Next: Cathleen Balid

RIV(UL)ET

5/21/2023

by Cathleen Balid

Inay told me that when you were born, your body was like the dagat. You were blue and sickly, frozen and exquisite, twisting and linear. Your skin was bitter salt, and when you shivered Inay prayed to the god of fishermen and the god of death. She asked them to bear her child like Ama bore the net, to bathe him in the effusive audacity swept by the sea.

Inay told me that I was born like a pearl. She told me that I was small and round, unlike you, and that I glistened like liquid condensing on a glass.
“I thought Ama was your pearl,” I said.

“Your Ama is an oyster,” Inay answered. Her fingers were warm and smelled like incense. “You are a pearl.” Then she pressed a comb against my dark hair, her lips pressed like veins, and softened my hair with the gentle pads of her fingers.

***

When you were younger, you prayed to Magnindan. You sat on the boardwalk and stripped the wood until you squeezed sticky smooth fish skin, until your palms steamed from hot water. With fat fingers you pulled a fish up and smiled with your crooked white teeth. You took pleasure in choking the fish with your fist. Your young legacy: innards, flat pink and slimy on the splintered wood. Eyes yellow like an empty lighthouse.

Ama told me that you were blessed by Magnindan. He watched you more than Inay did, from the corner of his eye, as his fingers wrinkled with dusted stones and fish blood. He watched as you plunged your feet into the sea and offered a lick of your skin, as you stole six pesos from his dirty wallet and used your tongue to run over its sandy grooves. He watched as you punctured a hole in a shell, waited for the reverberations to sear your ears. As you ran with shoes bought from the sari-sari and long limbs like parentheses, your body curving into a ripple, your shout mended into the wet exhale of the sea.

***

Inay used to say that the karinga belonged to you. She said that the festival was an expansion of your linen into rows of color, your stained fingertips on fish scales. She laughed at your cheeks, fat and sated on crab flesh as red as her printed lips, and said, “Anak, you are fed by the sea.”

Inay’s words froze the festival in time. There was the old manong with a gumless mouth, his suffocated fish. Your eyes glittering, wet like a newborn baby, drawn to the sea life. The pearls gliding from Inay’s teeth, pressed onto the raw hide of my throat: “These are yours to keep,” Inay’s fingers against my skin, pale with the pearl’s shiny luster.
You observed, like Ama observed, as I played softly with pearls. You didn’t speak, as if in foreshadowing. Perhaps you knew that it was your fate; that the pearls, caught by Ama, would become your deadened eyes. That your love for the sea would force you to steal from it–that you would run, circular, in the edges of its treasures.

But then, at the karinga, your veins popped blue like the sea. An explosion.

***

When you found your first pearl, Ama called you a man. Maybe it was because your body flowed into profit, your limbs restricted into dense periods, like the crystals found in damp caves. Maybe it was because you, body made from salt, were cursed to love from the sea but never taste it. And we were cursed to watch you.

Inay told me that you whistled to the wind, like a plea to the gods. That your hands often trembled among the ocean that you loved, as if unfamiliar, your face shaded like the slippery slope of the sand.

“I thought that he had given up on prayer,” I said.

Ama, the pearl-catcher, did not catch your blank face, but Inay did. “A prayer will always come from a blessing,” she told me gently, her fingers smooth across the nape of my neck. “And a pearl will always be a pearl.”

Inay fingered the pearls strung across my neck; in them I glimpsed the glitter of the sea, your youth merged in its wide hunger. You, astray, shivering.

***

I placed the pearls on your rugged palms, your straight back in reflection, and watched as your body dissolved into the dagat.

Cathleen Balid is a writer from Queens, New York. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Roanoke Review, Querencia Press, and Chasing Shadows Magazine. In her free time, she loves to journal, go on boba drives, and cuddle with her dog.

Back to: Issue Nine

Next: Julilette Hagobian

ODe to the Head Nod

4/8/2023

by Jonny Teklit

of which of course
there are many kinds
the one you offer
the acquaintance
or stranger that passes
in the hallway or street
whom you don’t know
well enough to stop
for a quick conversation
or whom you do but
time demands you be
elsewhere
or the one that escapes
you breathlessly
when your lover
with their hand cupped
against the crescent range
of your hip
who you’ve noticed is
among other things
very good at asking
precise questions
raises their head to
ask you if you’re okay
but your brain too
busy folding itself
over and over again
perhaps into a flower
or a paper crane
by which i mean
too preoccupied
to bother with language
settles for a rapid bobbling
which is very much
but not exactly like
the almost involuntary
and wordless
though not necessarily
without sound
slow nod that follows
the first bite of an
awaited meal
eyes closed after
the day you’ve had
after the unabashed
eagerness
from the server calling
out the name
of your dish
or the silent nod
you give the officer
to prevent the curses
buzzing in your mouth
from getting you
killed
the health inspector nod
the surgery news nod
the proposal nod
giddy
just like the day-
long nod the sunflowers
offer the light
their necks craning
and bowing so
many kinds
but this ode
is not for them
but for the one
i’m feeling tonight
at the outdoor venue
in virginia
the band i’ve waited
months to see
drawing out of me
a dormant delight
the drummer
telegraphing a love letter
through the stage
up my feet
into the capital
city of my body
the rhythm of it
vibrating my chest
pulling my chin
toward each shoulder
head bobbing like a pigeon
chief experts in nodding
the high note contorting
my face into a smile
and a grimace
awe teetering on disgust
the way music does
and to my left
the woman i befriended
at the start of the show
and the men beside her
and the woman beside them
the whole sea of us
in this amphitheater
also caught up
in this nod
the concert nod
the crown jewel
of them all
for the way
every nod and
all their meanings
fold into it:
I see you
keep going
thank god
fuck off
yes
yes
yes

Jonny Teklit is a recipient of the 2019 Aliki Perroti and Seth Young Most Promising Young Poet Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Adroit Journal, Catapult, and elsewhere. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Back to: Issue Nine

Next: Alia Hussain Vancrown

I can't afford the good hotels

2/15/2023

by Ron Riekki

because those cost a thousand dollars
and I’m not even talking about the great
hotels, because those are a billion dollars
an hour. I have to find the hotels where,
swear to God, there have been holes in
the wall so wide that I once passed my
car keys through it, to my cousin, who
forgot something inside. And then
there was the hotel, in Toronto, no less,
where a cop came to my door, knocked,
and told me that I didn’t want to stay
there. I’d already checked in. He said
he saw my license plate, that (yup) I’m
American, and said that I might want
to go to another hotel. I asked what
happened and he said, I’m not allowed
to say, and I imagined dead bodies piled
up on the other side of the walls, and
imagined that there were ticking bombs
in the swimming pool that was empty,
seen from my window, a perfect view
of the absence of water, and then I said,
Thank you, which made no sense, and
closed the door, and lied in bed, as
there was nowhere for me to go, this
feeling that if the building was about
to catch fire, then I deserved it, that
my dumb poverty was something I
somehow worked for, that it was my
fault to join the military, go in, get my
head drowned in explosive nothingness,
lose sleep over not having enough sleep,
get sick on sickness, its libraries that had
more porn than poetry (and that is not
an exaggeration), the beer vending
machines at the end of our barracks
hallway, how it was impossible to get
orange juice or real milk, but I could
get drunk twenty-four-seven, and then
the war where one bunkmate turned
bulimic, his way of coping, and then
another roommate got caught reading
out loud passages from his New
Testament while masturbating, got
sent for a psych eval and came back
stamped Good To Return To Work,
and then the suicides, how one night
I looked up and saw that the moon
had a rope tied around its glowing
neck, and there was a madness, pure
madness, when most of us weren’t
even front lines, because there is
no front in war anymore, just this
sort of chaos, where this child, and
we were all children, had just re-
turned from a bombing, and we
were at the mess hall, and some-
one asked him, How’d it go? and
he stopped eating, and said, How’d
it go? How’d it go! and he said,
This is how and took his plate,
lifted it over his head, filled with
food, and slammed it down, so
that potatoes parachuted from
the ceiling and peas crashed
into napkin holders and milk
pressed into our faces and he
gazed at us with the skin of
the dead and he ate every single
sleeping child in the world and
you could see there was a free-
way in his lungs and he tied his
chair back into a knot and walked
out of the room, taking the air
with him, and we sat there, in
hunger, and our childhoods were
on display, and war makes you
insane and insanity makes you
war, and war is the Deep End
and my PTSD counselor told me,
Just so you know, there’s no cure
for PTSD and then my other
PTSD counselor, when I told her
that, said, Don’t listen to a word
he said and I tried to erase my past,
but I can’t, tried, for years, to just
punch myself in the side of my
skull to try to reset my memory,
tried to chalkboard-fingernail
everything out of my brain, but
it’s so stuck in there, the Marine
that put his M16 in his mouth,
tasted the air-cooled, gas-operated
carbon steel, the theft of child-
hood, the honor of nothing and
everything, the fever of history,
the way that Thank you for your
service makes me draw my knees
into my chest, how the barracks
always scared me, especially
after the deaths, and, now, tonight,
for the first time, I went into my
phone, and started deleting all
the names of the dead, just
scrolling through, finding their
name (or their nickname), how
there was this opposite feel
when it was put into the phone,
how it was this new friendship,
and then, now, tonight, clicking
on their name, hitting Edit, then
Delete Contact and it was, at one
time, a contact, so much touching
in the military, how every single
bunkmate had their own distinctive
smell, a rot that was solely theirs,
and, now, it is a deletion, to take
out, cut out, strike out, and I’m
left with this empty apartment,
this cheap apartment, how I
always have to search and search
and search and search and search
and search to find some shit-
hole I can afford, some off-
kilter crypt where I never even
buy furniture, because I know
it would be stolen, keep all
the window shades open to
show how there’s nothing inside,
just my trembling body,
and no one wants to have that.

Ron Riekki is a poet/writer/editor from Florida and has been published by several publications such as Juked, The Threepenny Review, Wigleaf, Akashic Books, Beloit Poetry Journal, Spillway, Rattle, and many more. His books include U.P. (Ghost Road Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press). Right now, he’s listening to Mireille Mathieu’s “Addio.”

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Spencer Silverthorne

Flight Risk

2/15/2023

by Katie Tian

like all the other honey-lipped girls here, you hold this secret between the slits of your teeth: soft & pink & overripe with the night’s stickiness & the pork drippings from yesterday’s dinner. someone in the next room singsongs a children’s lullaby & it grates through the cloth of your milk-blue gown, paper-thin as a breath. the moon is silver & gaping & won’t stop leaking cold light against your bare skin. you bite down hard until the stale nectar on your breath turns to metal & blood.

tonight you dream of swallowing the moon. of smearing milk powder & peach juice across your warm mouth. of leaving through the window with a cherry-red wicker-basket & a dead gps, of running & running & running until the earth sputters out.

all the other sicknesses make you ugly, you know, they make you washed-out & cotton-stuffed. this one turns you soft & pink & fuckable. maybe that’s why you’re not trying. maybe that’s why you’ve rewritten your biography as an arithmetic sequence: small into smaller into gone.

the doctors wear all-white that make them look heavy with ghosts. the nurses teach you card games, sometimes. most of the time they watch you with their fisheyes searing constellations into your back.

the other girls share secrets with you. this is how to be pretty, & how to be liked. this is how to empty yourself gracefully, & how to die. this is how to be already halfway there.

you find it funny: how you only recognize the shape of your body when your limbs are blurred by bathwater. last time, you nearly drowned trying to flush sunflower seeds & milk taffy from the hollows of your esophagus. you lift yourself out, imagining this: 24-hour escape, cliff-bathing in colder streams, unsuturing your skin & wearing your ribcage like a necklace. the bathroom-tile walls press themselves closer with every breath.

your mother asks if there’s a boy. maybe it’s her fault, she says. maybe she spoonfed you so many fairytales that you grew up thinking you could be juliet. every girl wants to be wanted, she says.

maybe it was that boy you met last july under a red-bodied moon & two scoops of cotton-candy ice cream. the one who took you to the shore & kissed you in rhythm to the gentle lull of the waves, who gave you a whole world in the palm of your hand; until you realized one night, with his nectar tongue against your razor teeth, that you could never love him the way he loved you, because you were too many sharp edges & potholes that you tried to fill with his outline. he’s in arkansas now with a job selling vintage CDs, & you haven’t talked, & you’re still trying to fill the holes with pieces of everyone else.

so you answer, it’s complicated. because bloodshot eyes and cracked enamel don’t make a girl wanted. because this is the only way you know how to hold your body close. this is the only way to have a destination, because you don’t want to be that girl riding the back of a tow truck in circles around a barren field. this is how to know there’s a ground level: to know that if you fall, you won’t keep falling forever.

everyone else has written letters home by now, but you’ve forgotten how to spell. because your brain is all fucked up now, & because there’s not enough breath between the syllables of i miss you & i’m gonna be okay, okay to ask for forgiveness, & then to ask if your mother still sings along to your favorite song on the stereo. you want to fold yourself into the flap of a red-lettered envelope & mail yourself home, or into the space between your mother’s arms. but you’re not a poet, & you don’t know how to walk away from the warmest place you’ve been given.

there is no ending to this elegy. all the honey-lipped girls are dead, you know, & none of this is beautiful. which is to say: there are pieces of you everywhere now, but never enough to make a whole. which is to say: maybe you’ve lost the game, but maybe there was no way of winning to begin with. which is to say: even at the bottom of the well, you’re still dreaming of bluer skies.

Katie Tian is a sixteen-year-old Chinese-American writer from New York. Her work is published in Frontier Poetry, Polyphony Lit, Rising Phoenix Review, and Kissing Dynamite, among others. She has been recognized by Hollins University, Smith College, the Adelphi Quill Awards, and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Apart from writing, she enjoys collecting stuffed animals and consuming obscene amounts of peanut butter straight from the jar.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Ron Riekki

The Speaker is Listening to "Opus 23" by Dustin o'Halloran after an occasion of not seeing anyone for miles

2/9/2023

by Spencer Silverthorne

Opus 23 - Dustin O'Halloran

Dustin O’Halloran is an American pianist and composer with five acclaimed solo albums under his own name. He released his first EP Sundoor with renowned classical musical label Deutsche Grammophon in 2019, and followed that up with his solo album Silfur in 2021. He’s also a member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen with Adam Wiltzie, and they released their album The Undivided Five with Ninja Tune in 2019 and self-released their latest album Invisible Cities in 2021.

0:01

Brown roof, blue roof,
Blue, blue, blue, brown

0:11

LOVER 1
What’s been whipped after years of neglect.

0:25

Everyone minds
the difference
between the tenuous
and tender.

1:26

Everyone forgets
to mind the surge.

1:34

LOVER 1
You had to catastrophize the measure of time.

LOVER 2
Friend, your candidacy is no longer under consideration.

LOVER 1
O Friend, your cadence tracked in mud from a stomp in the woods.

1:52

Everyone flubs
their own farewell
to become a stranger.

LOVER 2
So, watch for the water moccasin.

LOVER 1
Everyone wants a problem if it means new tennis shoes.

2:16

Pity these foals
trembling
in the midst
of these strangers’
passing wonder.

LOVER 2
Never be someone’s passing wonder.

2:48

Vector, here and there,
with some fingers to the sky.

2:52

LOVER 1
...with hopes that the blame’s set for your natural comeuppance.

Spencer Silverthorne (he/him) is a poet and PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He's also the Poetry Editor at Rougarou: A Journal of Arts and Literature. His work has been published in Black Warrior Review, Dream Pop Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Sundog Lit, and Westchester Review, among others. Currently he is working on a full-length collection of poetry called Deep in the Pitch of Elsewhere.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Patty Paine

10 Years later, breaking up while listening to leslie Cheung

9/26/2022

By Jacqueline Xiong

Prose Runner Up of the Inaugural Surging Tide Summer Contest
Selected by Angie Sijun Lou

十年後，邊聽著張國榮邊分手
After Enshia Li

當愛已成往事
唱：張國榮

往事不要再提
人生已多風雨
縱然記憶抹不去
愛與恨都還在心裡
真的要斷了過去
讓明天好好繼續
你就不要再苦苦追問我的消息
愛情它是個難題
讓人目眩神迷
忘了痛或許可以
忘了你卻太不容易
你不曾真的離去

Bygone Love trans. Jacqueline Xiong
Singer: Leslie Cheung

Don’t bring up the past for me
Our lives have been stormy at sea
Though I can’t erase your memory
My heart’s love and hate remain to be
If we are to let the past break slowly
And continue tomorrow carefree
Please stop asking for me
Love is a difficult query
Which turns people hazy and dizzy
Maybe I can forget the agony
But forgetting you is not easy
You’re never truly leaving

***

April Fools’, 2013. A decade after the abandonment of all artistic expression. You are deposited into a world of disquietude, confusion, and dissonance, waiting for Enya to come home. Let’s break up, you practice, but that doesn’t sound right. Instead you try 我們分手吧. It sounds better, but only in a slow, linguistic way. In Mandarin, there is none of the absolute dissolution characterized by breaking up--there is only 分手吧, a reluctant parting of hands, a goodbye.

On the thin slice of TV, rioting cymbals and paiban scurry across the stage of Farewell My Concubine. You and Enya watched this film too many times to count, the first few times with your respective families when it first came out in 1993, then the two of you together on this couch after your parents tsked and said it was too homosexual, too tragic. But even though you had to sit through the entire 171 minutes on a couch too sweaty for the summer heat, Enya liked it too much for you to turn it off. Enya has always been more transfixed by the ineffable tragedy of the film—a main character who was forced to become a Peking opera actor, a protagonist who breathed in tandem with the 旦 he portrayed on stage, a boy who blurred the lines between stage and reality until he gave up his life to find the answer.

He had a choice, you used to tell Enya during the ending theme song. She would’ve stopped crying by then. The boy could’ve disentangled himself from the story. The Hegemon-King Bids His Lady Farewell was only a play, nothing more. If he could’ve detached himself from the play, it would’ve saved him.

She only shook her head. 不瘋魔不成活. If you don’t go insane, you don’t survive.

What?

Do you see? He was mourning. He had to become someone else, someone within another story, so his grief wasn’t his own.

That’s silly, you said. Then nothing was his own—his love, his hate.

She shrugged. So maybe he had nothing, to begin with.

Now, you watch the boy’s last act as someone else. A sword flashes across the stage and leaves behind bloody blossoms on Lady Yu’s neck as she convinces herself to die for a man who doesn’t love her back. In every rendition of this play, the year is 202 BC, and Lady Yu dies for the Hegemon King. The vibrant curtains close and so does the boy’s role, but this is an opera within a movie, and so the tragedy continues. The boy is not Lady Yu but Cheng Dieyi, but he still cuts his throat for a man who doesn't love him back, on the stage he loves the most; and as the film ends, you know that ten years later Cheng Dieyi’s actor will also die, and that ten years after that, a part of you will also die.

Enya is right: it’s one life within another, one death within another, like these wooden Matryoshka dolls nestled so tightly into each other you’d think they’re one whole. Cheng Dieyi died alongside Lady Yu. Ten years later on April first, Cheng’s actor threw himself off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel because some part of him had died alongside Cheng. Ten years after that, in the AC-less basement of a shabby apartment in Kowloon, you mourn Leslie Cheung and think of breaking up with your girlfriend.

The TV screen fades to black. You rewind the movie once more, waiting for Enya to come home.

你始終在我心裡
我對你仍有愛意
我對自己無能為力
因為我仍有夢
依然將你放在我心中

You live in my heart for eternity
I still have love for you, baby
I have no power against me
Because I am still dreaming--
In my heart, still loving

***

Enya is an artist, a sentimentalist, and an idealist. You think it started when her Ba chased her out of the house after finding a stash of nude figure studies in her room, all sorts of bodies and shapes that an already cheap history major shouldn’t be dabbling in. Enya said that her Ba yelled something about drawing shameful men and she yelled right back, I draw women too.

Since then, you and Enya live in the basement of an apartment on the cusp edge of Hong Kong. None of your families know— it’s a secret like the film you watch over and over again, even if you’re tired of it. Enya is an art major now and she spends days in figure studies that she sells for HK$20. You’re still staying up until 1 AM to transfer your handwritten novel manuscript to a rundown Mac that always reacts too slowly. You two are in love. Most days, that’s all that matter.

But some days, on the old cracked phone you got from your Ma, you still get a call here, a text message there. 什麼時候回家啊，寶貝？When are you coming home, sweetie? You have a home already, but some days you’re still depressed and turn it into art to pay rent. You think that’s what Enya does too, because artists always do something with their wounds until it’s no longer theirs. You think that’s a freedom artists have that no one else does.

You think that’s why Enya likes the movie so much—you think that’s why you hate it so much.

***

Cheng Dieyi mourns so much that you don’t notice. The only way he shows grief is through screaming—when his mother chops off his misshaped finger, when he shatters glass against the wall like sound alone can displace an opium addiction, when he shapes the cavity of his mouth for Lady Yu to reside in the hollow of his throat. He’s so silent and loud about pain that every shrill, excruciating sound he makes can be interpreted as a song; and maybe his grief does come in a song not sung by himself, but by Lady Yu.

At twenty-two, Enya does not mourn. She says it’s too public of a display, and that mourning is something stitched together of constituent sadness and rage, and that if you remake it, it goes away. She heaves old heavy canvas onto the couch and rolls new acrylic over the paintings that her Ba slashed with a kitchen knife. She says to you one night, Sometimes I think storymaking is insanity.

You remember: 不瘋魔不成活. So it’s survival?

She is quiet for a heartbeat. Could be.

What’s the difference, you say. Then, because the radio is still buzzing on some old Leslie Cheung song: I think you’re getting a little too crazy about that film.

Do you think it’s tragic too? She asks. You shrug.

We’re storymaking all the time. Nothing too tragic about us.

But he’s so tragic, she says. We can do whatever. But he only has one other person to be. It’s one person or nobody.

You make yourself emotional, you tell her. She looks at you absently, like you’re just another character study of hers, like you’re someone in a painting or a black-and-white movie or even a memory.

He only has one other person to be, she insists. Lady Yu has to love the Hegemon King, so he has to love Duan Xiaolou, who plays the king. Isn’t it tragic that he only has one other person to love? And the sad part is because Duan Xiaolou doesn’t have to be someone else, he doesn’t love him back.

Annoyed, you say, Can you stop talking about that film?

She closes her eyes for a moment and opens them again. You’re right. Slowly, she reaches to the bedside table and turns the radio low, until it’s only a teeny buzzing through the papery walls. We should go to sleep.

總是容易被往事打動
總是為了你心痛
別留戀歲月中
我無意的柔情萬種
不要問我是否再相逢
不要管我是否言不由衷
為何你不懂
只要有愛就有痛

The past and I are always touching
For you, I am always hurting
Don’t linger over years of our passing
Or my tenderness before our parting
Don’t ask me if we’ll be meeting
Don’t ask whether I’m honest or lying
Why are you not understanding
That if we’re loving, we’re hurting

***

You don’t like Cheng Dieyi, but you like Leslie Cheung. On the radio, you pretend not to listen to his old songs, but you listen to them late at night more times than not. Unlike Cheng, Cheung is a real person— used to be, anyway, before he became a splatter of greasy blood and flesh at the bottom of a Hong Kong hotel.

Enya has always been too consumed with storymaking that she’s a little like Cheng Dieyi: loving you because you’re the only other person for her to love outside of her unspoken grief. Every time she rewinds Farewell My Concubine, she loves you more. Holds you closer like she’s afraid you’ll disintegrate into shadow. Sit side by side with you on the couch until your bodies are touching, flushed in the gooey, pooling summer shelter. It’s almost like a possession—storymaking until you’re only a story, until your feelings are no longer your own but a product of your ideal creation.

It’s almost like the way your Ma asks you, every other day after you told her you won’t be going home: 你真的喜歡她嗎？Do you really like her? 這種關係不會長久的。This kind of relationship won’t last. 兩個女生有什麼好交往的？What kind of relationships can two girls have? Questions you can’t answer, because for others, between you two, love is not a feeling but a fancy.

You’re here, you want to tell Enya. But you’ve never quite had that way of hers— remaking reality until it bends to her will. You can never reconstruct a new world aside from what you have. Your first time watching Leslie Cheung on stage, you were sitting with your Ma and Ba on the tattered couch in your old Beijing home, crunching on kuaci and sesame candy. While your mother tsked and your father left for another plate of kuaci, you watched as Leslie Cheung become Cheng Dieyi and Lady Yu, fitting into one shell after another so effortlessly, it was like he was unraveling layers of himself to the world. He did have something of his own, you thought. The process of becoming someone else but keeping your own grief.

Your grief isn’t like Enya’s— it does not change. But grief always stays. You won’t want it to leave. Somedays you’ll be so full of unexpressed love, you’re as light as a bird; some days you’ll flail and choke when it has no place to go but to writhe and crash inside of you. And when it shatters, the little pieces of grief don’t go away, either; they trickle into that empty hollow in your heart where your love is until they blow up into one enormously injured, bleeding thing. From that point on, with these shards wedged forever in your chest, you’ll be prepared to injure.

It’s like a contagion, these shards. You stick a hand into your solar plexus and twist, the way you would remove the pit from a ripe avocado until the fragment vomits itself with a sighed pop. It glitters in your hand like a stone someone plunged deep into the sea. And because it will no longer be yours after the breakup, this enraged grief, you set it aside to where Enya usually perches on the couch, knowing that when she opens the door and sits down, it will become part of her as well.

有一天你會知道
人生沒有我並不會不同
人生已經太匆匆
我好害怕總是淚眼朦朧
忘了我就沒有痛
將往事留在風中
為何你不懂
只要有愛就有痛
有一天你會知道
人生沒有我並不會不同
人生已經太匆匆
我好害怕總是淚眼朦朧
忘了我就沒有痛
將往事留在風中

One day you will know
Life without me won’t be altering
Life is already running, running
I’m so scared of always crying
There’s no pain in forgetting
In the wind, no pain in leaving
Why are you not understanding
That if we’re loving, we’re hurting
One day you will know
Life without me won’t be altering
Life is already running, running
I’m so scared of always crying
There’s no pain in forgetting
In the wind, no pain in leaving

***

Jacqueline Xiong is a Chinese-American writer from Houston. Her fiction has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and can be found in Waxwing Journal, Sine Theta Magazine, and elsewhere. She enjoys composing music, putting together Spotify playlists, and tweeting chaotically at @jacquelanx.

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: Kaiser Louis

MUSCLE MEMORY

9/26/2022

By Ai Li Feng

content warning for blades, bulimia, self-harm

In the mouth of every memory, my mother. Light glinting along her jaw like teeth. She is halving heads of Chinese cabbage, fists of cilantro. I can't cut vegetables because she keeps the knives out of reach, afraid I will become accustomed to violence. I am limited to peeling potatoes and carrots. Scrapes and small scratches. When I nick my knuckles, I don't find the cut until I notice the well of blood. The reversal of hurt. My mother says I'm lucky, to lose something so easily. To have a wound with no memory of it. She ghosts against the scar silvering her wrist, veins thinning into tree trunks. She knows anger the way an ax knows wood. The back of her hand flat as a blade. We flinch when the clock strikes twelve, and she shelves the cutting board behind the sink, sheathes all the knives. She clears away a space for me at the counter before softening each grain of rice in warm water, placing her hands in the pot. Instead, rust between each joint. When we sit together, our shadows merge like metal fevering beneath the same forge. Still, the temperature rises and a degree of separation remains between us.

My mother is always hovering, holding herself back. When she was pregnant, she was told to expect a miscarriage. She would confront her reflection in the glass, dragging her nails against her face, gasping open. She thought she was unrecognizable. Instead, she looked like her mother with more of her hurt. When she went to the hospital, she clenched her fists until the veins came to the surface of her skin for air. A birthmark blooming beneath her ribs in memoriam. The only thing that you are capable of carrying is grief, her mother said, and she believed her. How my body was buried in her body and she was so grave, so cold and unmoving as the nurse delivered me like news of a relative's death. The nurse told her to hold her child and all she could see were her hands, rivering in red. Then I screamed and she started to sob, said take her away, I keep hurting her. We were each other's only family. There was no one to tell when I was born.

My mother doesn't speak of the hospital but still, I mistake the stretch marks clawing my waist with the white tissue on her stomach from the pregnancy. Beneath my fingernails, the cuticles scaled with rust. In the department stores, I start searching for larger, looser clothing, which means more stitches, longer scars seaming the fabric. The salesclerk comments that we don't look like we're related, our faces too different, wounds too foreign, and my mother feels relief in a flood. I flush. Sometimes, I measure my body against my mother's body and I am larger than her anger. I outgrow her grief, submerge in smaller memories in which I slot into her shadow like a child, heartbeat still inseparable from her own.

In the bathroom, I imagine a gap between my thighs, wide enough to show gums, and skin my teeth. When I double over, each hurt is reflected into two. The pads of my fingers softening with spit as I try to ingest the prints and regurgitate a different, changed body. Instead, I climb into the belly of the bathtub and replicate birth, come up to the surface of my grief for air. I keep emptying my lungs as if screaming but nothing leaves my throat so I hold the backs of my knees, pull the patellas closer to my heart in a fetal position. I can name every limb in this body but not possess it like a ghost returning home. On the other side of the door, my mother is standing against the wood, pressing her palms against it as she tries to detect the quiet pulse of my gasping. Her hands are heavy and mine are heaving. We are separated only by a few syllables.

When I sit at the table that evening, my mother offers me a bowl that she had filled with her memories of me, mouth sticky with sweet rice, soft fruit. Instead, I trace the pattern of blue rabbits and bluer moons. I think about Chang'e and the loneliness of hunger as my mother mirages a second stomach, swallows the leftovers from her own attempt at loving. She knows how to eat for two but she still gets sick. I hold back her hair as she empties. My fingers soft on her shoulders, small circles on her spine. She bends her body into a fetal position and I pull her toward my own. I feel so full of fossilized griefs so I dig my fingernails deep and excavate my ribcage, clear enough space to carry this wound without speaking of it.

My mother starts eating by herself in the evening, solitary and shadowless. When the light begins to thin, I cradle my head against her collarbones as she stands still and wooden, sheathing her hands against my sharp bones, my serrated back. How the body opens to both tenderness and the touch of a blade, leaving a threshold where we can linger before we close our mouths like doors. There will always be a distance between us. I am not my mother. It is easier for her to love an echo of her body than her body.

Ai Li Feng is a young writer with work in Waxwing. She reads for the Farside Review.

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Next: Jacqueline Xiong

UNDULATIONS IN THE RENAISSANCE

9/26/2022

By Ariana Duckett

With lyrics incorporated from "Dayglow" by Fuzzybrain

I.
Pretty please
Where do I begin?
Oh, I don't understand it either
And I don't think I can
Fuzzybrain call it what you want
I've felt so distant lately as if I were not

I live in a small liberal arts college campus and it is autumn. My classes are not too difficult, nor do they engage me. I’m not sure where I go after my classes end, just that I find myself surrounded by redwoods that pierce the sky, threatening to conquer it. I am far away from home and the days end sooner and the nights are more intimidating, menacing. It takes extra effort to get out of bed while it is dark, and I think of my friends back home. Burnt orange sweaters and red cheeks and white rooftops. Whose memories are these?

II.
There's rain outside, steady winter
My heart feels like such a mixture
Shapeless, I stare at her picture
I don't know her, but I miss her
Why, oh why such things?

The nights are quieter and friendships are more intimate, concrete. I wonder how everyone else is doing, and I daydream much more. I think about Christmas, and the end, and the special places that I share with special people. When it comes to old friendships, I am a flower girl: the silky memories of my old flings and frivolous choices scatter in my shadow, hidden from the new crowd around me. Back then, it was easier to make me smile; I seemed to hold a fragment of everyone around me in my soul. There was the girl I fell in love with, the boy who fell in love with me, and the boy I dated, all of which have nearly forgotten me. I see their pictures and I see the scattered petals, the remains of a garden I no longer visit, that has been flooded by my ‘else’: the myriad of distractions I find caked around my new environment. An alien horizon I can’t navigate, and a cleansing rainfall I can’t make stay. I used to miss my friends; now I miss my classes. But don’t I love them?

I wonder who I’ve locked gazes with in the past 24 hours, if they will also become integrated parts of my soul. The colors grow warmer while the nights grow colder. We decline to do many things now; reading outside, swimming, talking too loudly. We were so busy making all our mistakes during the summer that there is nothing left to do now other than talk about the spring, which we are pretty sure is coming someday. We debate convoluted topics and long for home.

There is too much rain to nurture the gardens; now it just kills everything, slowly, almost beautifully.

III.
Write it down absent of the pen
The sun has been set for hours and she's rising again
Scattered mind, I call it a friend
I wish I thought a bit less and spoke up instead
In my head

Long drives, shivering, snow. You ask me how I’m doing, and I smile and say I’m fine, and my cheeks stay dry. I think you’re flirting with me. I think you’ll use my honesty against me. Gentle music, quiet questions. We have no childhoods anymore. Let’s hug tight, until the snow covers our arms and we become snow angels. Let’s discuss old habits and new myths. The sun is not up yet, and we have time to dissect the stars and sprinkle them on our birthday cakes. The night laps up yesterday’s worries, and everything is rhapsodic, unending. This is why I keep a tissue in my pocket - not to touch against my tears, but to annotate my romances, with the snow and the sun and the silhouettes. The silhouettes alter: everyone looks different in the variant light of truth, and it will trick you if you don’t pay close enough attention. The hero of the night might turn into the morning’s mourning villain. You will feel the sorrow I have felt, and you will need it to get through the renaissance.

IV.
There's rain inside my skeleton frame
A hurricane within my rib cage
I never left but I never stayed
I'm cleaning out the fuzz in my brain
Time and time again

Coffee fixes nothing except smiles on our faces, but we already knew that. Slow dance. String lights. Soft romance, no louder than the falling leaves. I never did anything right, so I hope you’ll forgive me. Shake your head. Try again.

She’s in love with you.

What do you remember from your time with her? Surely her smile, surely not her side-eye. I wish I remembered her better, but we could not call ourselves a duo of the night until the end, when everything grew crucial and immediate, and we could decline each other’s presence no more.

I talk about my past-love, and you talk about your new-love, and it empties us of our souls. Milky fairy light, like what we tried to string on our ceiling. Homework unfinished. They would be ours if we were not ourselves. But we can be each other to each other for each other, unabridged children from colorful homes in different oases.

V.
I never left but I never stayed
I'm cleaning out the fuzz in my brain
Time and time again
Oh, it's time and time again

Waffles and smiles and dissatisfying answers. One AM, before anyone can understand what’s going on, but after the protection of our regular lives has gone home. You tell me something, and I struggle to hear what you’re saying, because the air is thick and you hesitate to be honest.

They finally got together, you inform me. Two hummingbirds conquering the night in their shimmery-teal armor, and have survived into the morning, and have accepted each other’s truths. You always see them together, humming the same songs. Can we share earbuds? So that you can listen to my thoughts. Piece through my rubble. Find a child cowering in a half-destroyed closet. A closet in a garden in a thunderstorm in the nighttime. It’s happening again, and childhood is seeping back into the cracks of our redwood-protected campus-kingdom. You’ve learned nothing at all.

VI.
I’ve learned nothing at all.

Ariana Duckett is a British-born writer and editor studying creative writing in Southern California. She has been published in Lunch Ticket, Rainbow Poems, and Manuscription Magazine, was a poetry editor for Wingless Dreamer Publisher and is a current staff writer for Fulminare Review. Her other interests include astronomy, listening to music and ice skating.

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Next: Daniel Liu