By Ziyi Yan
Twilight chars itself into a husk.
Somewhere between what I never shed
and what you never kept,
flowers have wormed
through our branches.
There must have been a time
when we buried ourselves in the dirt,
like frigid lips, or a blubbering fist.
Even now, my hands feel like your hands,
as we grasp for petals, shivering
at our touch–
they did not stop, but grew numb.
I sprawled a vine across my sky, soaked in my mildew.
I wrapped myself in you under this same sky,
same clouds clinging like a rash.
What is a clock, or the skin cells I’ve shed of you?
I could cut open my face to see my skull, the same as yours.
If only you would drown yourself in mud, groping leech,
if you would bite off your own squirming
head. I’m pulling you out this last time,
to suck my own blood
back.
But the arteries are strangled–
the water never leaves my roots.
Tonight the cicadas shriek on my barren body,
and I envy you, eating my flesh like it is dust,
sowing a dead thing
in my skin.
Teach me how to crawl in the dirt
you call the sky. I will fall and rip out your roots,
reaching at the sky for my own flowers.
I will grow skin and skin and never shed.
What’s inside would be dying too,
if I could still hear it.
You don’t wonder why every tree has become a gaping claw,
why our hands are littered with branching scars.
I do–
I still do.
Ziyi Yan (闫梓祎) is a young Chinese writer living in Connecticut. Her work is published in Poetry Northwest, Rust and Moth, Kissing Dynamite, and Peach Mag, among others. She is also the editor-in-chief of the Dawn Review. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @Ziyiyan___ or visit her website
