Passacaglia
The classroom was a Stravinsky sort of mess. Sixes &
sevens pulsing like puppets in fear of two things: the spring
& sacrifice. In one of the leftmost corners was a teacher, crying
because I called her an owl in my first story. In this jungle,
birdsongs & bloodlines split like pistachio shells & what’s left is a
truth that stays stuck between your teeth for a while, softer with
every breath of a new name. Under a statue of Confucius on the
way home, I read a book about trees that gave too much. By then, I had
learned the difference between leave & leaving, how the
latter drags out the tongue as if a lengthened syllable could fulfill a
ghosted landscape. How the city was kind in its youth, and the branches
knit shade for the fresh skin of an immigrant. For show & tell, I brought a
photograph of a bobcat with a snake in its mouth, & that was the
first time I heard the word hanging. Months later I heard it used to
describe Roald Dahl’s nose after a childhood car crash, & years later,
to describe a Chinese college student in New York, two blocks from a cousin
whom I had forgotten. & I said I thought birds didn’t hang. I thought feathers
only rested on nose bridges like that first grade teacher’s glasses, big as
owl eyes. I thought spring was about a different kind of unearthing. & every
summer hummingbirds greener than lakes stick their beaks into the feeders
hanging from my eroding trellis. But only this year did I realize,
these are not the only birds that can fly backwards.
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Rain Diptych
I.
The storm was a seamstress. Friday rippled as we cracked fortunes
through the gravel. Allegedly, the glass is half full. Allegedly,
time scatters like sand, stands still when it rains. Engraved to temples in
buckets and bored palms, worshiped when we can’t stand to break
a thing we created. In the haze, we devour reflections like lotuses, each puddle
hemmed, every crater patched to a pretty thing. Through blurred windows,
I mistake stars for cities and the wind for a breath damp with confession.
How the raindrop’s caress is a soaking promise: to drench a floured tongue,
squeeze into a fading lip, or to never touch you at all. It runs a pinky
through my hair like swan feet through a stream. The curls loosen like
petals, each strand a different omen. In the sun we made two promises:
no love poems, no cigarettes. How the drizzle offers moonlight for a call.
II.
The storm was a seamstress, as if we could write a weekend on a label tucked
against our necks. You’ve lost your jacket in wet winds twice now, the second time
near the phone box reeking of tobacco, our feet sand-stained from the
search. I breathe swan songs like a toad under lotus leaves, the suffocating
static stuffed into sacks. The sky is a dime in this well, a thing you would
pluck from the gravel and throw to me, and I would catch it like a shameplant
closing to the touch. How the rain inks scars into a neckline. How
my hair tangles with a million herring and dries in salt. The night is oiled
against our tongues like beads of secrets in a stream, and our promises slip
open like clams. Each pearl, a hazy reflection. Each raindrop, a thing
lost from the clouds.
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Ava Ye/叶曳 is a Chinese writer attending high school in Los Angeles. She has been awarded a national medal by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and recognized by the National Council of Teachers of English with first class distinction. Ava is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and her poetry is published or forthcoming in Whale Road Review, The Penn Review, BreakBread Magazine, and Kissing Dynamite, where she was January’s featured poet. Aside from writing, Ava is often enjoying iced coffee and waiting for the next rainstorm.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 