Flight Risk

by Katie Tian

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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.

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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. 

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