Two PoemS

by Mackenzie Duan

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Eyeline

Christmas Eve     power outage,
     wind heaving           like a throat. My body     
never ends. Traffic ribs
              the street, an orange omen.     
Any cavity     is a keyhole. I lock
         my eyes. In this dim,
the house is               anyone’s. No red
     calendars, miniature Buddhas,       painted 
money plants.        No mercy
    in spite of touch. Someone       in the world
    is dying. Like light.        It’ll pass.
Down the power lines,       a beating
        cavern of bats.       I want to drift
  like dark through     the blinds, 
like gills, gasping & muscled.         I want
  to love     a jammed signal. The clarity
of calamity, mirrors,        bluescreen. It’s hard to
       say where anyone will        land: the direction
  of bonfire smoke,     the misdirection of moons 
bowling over our roofs.             Countries kiss 
   each other’s eyelids,       islands. A gust
  of good night. Leafless trees             in love. Somewhere
the world is     still. It’ll pass.

Advice from Co-Star

My horoscope says: 
full disclosure, ripe fruit, long kiss.

Instead I am an unkissable green
strawberry. Briefly still. 

At the family reunion, I whet my hands
over the surface of the ice 

chest. Tsingtao beer caps like gold 
gunshot wounds. Full 

disclosure, my family
estrangement is so cliché 

that it embarrasses me
to describe it. A bowl

of frozen mangos approaches.
We will never talk enough

about time. The mangos
thaw & the sky today

has no depth. I ford
my relatives like a branch

brittling. Full disclosure,
I’ve never wanted

to be this close to death.
Enough is a kiss 

on the cheek. My grandfather still saves 
joke wrappers. 

My mother still kneads the mangos 
before first bite. 

I spent years jumping
ship, promising to never return

to these backroads. This bottlenecked
house. But here is the twine

that veins the tomato garden.
Here is the ruptured fly screen. 

The print of two deadlocked cyclers,
the sister who ripped out

her hair. Full disclosure.
I still want my kin to recall me

from the cliff. To plant me
like a flag,

a ripe kiss. O, how the living
grace me. How easy 

the mangos defrost, 
how silent my hands

skim over the ice.

Mackenzie Duan is a highschooler from the Bay Area. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Vagabond City Lit, Frontier Poetry, Electric Literature, and elsewhere.

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