daughter of the water drowns now
in a sea of her own making.
bitter, never, ever sweet.
she admonishes herself, steel-jawed, fists tight at her side.
“foolish songbird,
duped by the rhapsody of a sugared mouth.”

with lungs weeping, begging for air, she knows:
those dulcet four months had been copper.
true gold did not rust with time,
did not melt before a meager flame,
felt not the chill of winter.
she had loved her prince
with the fire of reckless, unlearned youth--
the first love she had always dreamed of.
even so,
the knives beneath her feet,
his lukewarm uncertainty,
were another mountain
she could not carry,
would not cross.

she breathed noxious air as a child,
toxic, roiling poison. clouds of malevolent vapor
choking mediocrity to death.
there was no joy
without flawlessness.

both her parents are wanderers,
dreamers called to the land of endless potential,
born in the East beneath swaying coconut leaves
and the fragrant papaya tree
and the looming shadow that is poverty.
“We had it worse,” they remind her,
raising the mountain even higher
every time she dares to think she’s reached the top.
her father used to sell gum on the sidewalk
and her sister ate nothing but soy sauce and rice
all beneath the blistering, humid heat of the tropics.

when her 8th grade teacher tells the class
to write nice notes to each other
the only thing her friends see
is her 10/10 math workbook
and not her.
she is just their cheat sheet
and their notebook.
she crumples the notes with shaking fists.
what is expected is not impressive.
“good job” is the same as “do it again”.

she carries their words on her shoulders.
titanic stones, breaking bones,
“you are not enough.”
she reminds herself that the stars waver too
on the night her father strikes her across the face
for the first and only time
and bitter bile scorches her tongue.
hideous insults would spiral from her pink lips
if she still had a voice.

anger is not smoke,
does not move with the winds of change.
so she carves red lines into her wrist, new gills
to breathe out the pain,
vents for the poison.
her only lifeline.
when she turned thirteen
she sat on the worn curb dotted with old gum
and watched the sun set on her youth.

wielding that arctic flame of a heart,
she stumbles into a pair of mesmerizing green eyes.
she has never liked honey
but has a sweet tooth for his prophecies anyway.
and he says it first, a magic spell,
calls her at midnight and whispers softly
“I love you”.

she buys a couple's necklace set, a tether, a leash,
gives him the golden puzzle piece
and keeps the silver heart with a hole in it
even though one day he runs away
with the last gold of her heart,
like she feared he would.
his eyes were moss.
parasitic beauty.

the dark haze,
the void he left behind,
does not hurt.
the other boys made her cry, but she has no tears for this.
this wound does not ache,
does not fester. a different malady,
it ***** the warmth from her smiles,
the mirth from her laughter
a drought of emotion.
she spins the razor-blade between her index and middle fingers
and wishes she was strong enough to die.

the spring rises from the horizon soon enough,
dancing along the dry amber plains of the neighborhoods, painting their lawns green
a new beginning, from an unwilling ending.
quietly she descends into the dark,
fingers twined together in prayer,
offering herself to the night,
offering no resistance against the silence
stifling her lungs and heart.

she writes these words and passes them to me—
pain is easier when shared.
fingers intertwined,
ill-fated loves be ******, we turned ourselves to gold
and reveled in our own brightness,
shining fierce through the icy mists of uncertainty.

the day after Thanksgiving my sister shatters my monitor and
I scream myself hoarse, cry tears that burn hot and angry.
my friends tell me that this is abuse.
they ask me when I will be free.
I close my eyes,
whisper softly to myself,
“have spirit, not spite!”
and somehow breathe myself
back to life.

my father still looks at me
and tells me I am wider than the day before
as if I do not look in the mirror and mourn the sight of myself.
I am not what they expected.
smiling, (he thinks he means well),
I say that I can only grow as I get older
and let the weight slide off my shoulders.
it is not my job to carry the burden
of his unfulfilled dreams.

my sister kicks open my door to wake me,
calls me useless,
and stalks off. she will return with more poison, in time.
I return to my sleep,
unconcerned,
an antidote of my own
against their relentless venom.
soon I will purge two decades of toxicity
from my heart.

twelve days before her nineteenth birthday
the green-eyed one returns.
the girl who burns waits in silence,
hatred ready and eager at the edge of her fingertips.
he dares to tell her “I love you still.”

she doesn’t bother to remind herself that she too loved him once
before she takes her sweet time to tear him apart.
on that night she relishes the guilt in his voice
when she reminds him how she cried
until the tears dried
and the pain stole her breath away too.
he abandoned her,
saying it was the best for both of them
when it was really just the best for him.
if she was cruel
she would call him a coward.

she turns her back on that copper love
flower seeking sunlight elsewhere.
she finds it in herself one day,
not in the arms of another,
the strength to best her Everest.

fifteen and foolish,
she thought she found love
in a twig of a boy
with eyes the color of dirt.

he called her his best friend
said he loved her [as a friend]
when she offered him her heart in December.
she wished he would say these things aloud.
but it is too easy and simple to make honeyed promises
behind the screen of a phone.

two weeks later the new boy caresses her closest friend,
tucking black hair dyed purple
(she wished it wasn’t her favorite color)
behind blushing ears. the trench between them
ensures she will never be embraced
by those thin arms or
skinny promises again.

sarcastic and seventeen, she was satisfied
with laughter and rainless mornings.
fingers stained gold with marker ink,
hours spent rolling on the cold floor after school.
when the hard work in the artwork was too much
they danced across the freshly polished floors,
skating on dusty socks
howling outdated love ballads.
and one day a boy with hooded eyes walks in
and joins their after-hours circle.

he calls her beautiful.
the blaze on her cheeks says her heart believes him.
his arms are thin, too, saplings, budding flowers.
his laugh is the joy of summer come two seasons early.
“I’ll never leave you,” he says,
sewing her eyes shut with infatuation.
one late November night they spend lying
on the cold, black cement of the basketball courts
he tells her he’s talking to someone
she knows isn’t her.

in Room 13B she sits in his lap
each word falls like a petal until the last one hits the floor
and she knows with a horrible certainty:
“he loves me not.”
heart gray with ash,
burned out and tired,
she relapses into red again, swears she’ll never trust again
as the cold, indifferent metal sinks into her arm.

his last words to her are an apology text she never opens.
alight with resentment,
she tapes the razor to the bottom of her desk
and cloaks herself with cold blue flame. rage.

ironically, the last thing she ever says to him is “thank you”.

in the eighteenth winter of my life
I and the songbird of the sea
were one and the same. she was a melody
echoing the first death of my heart. it went gently

or so she tells me.
like a whisper of wind,
though it felt more like
an adder’s kiss.
she held my hand and told me,
“little bird, breathe. we will be okay.”
looked me in the eyes, the dusk in hers,
as I watched the blood.
drops dripping, dropping.

the razor-blade taped to the bottom of the desk
is gone now,
though the girl who burns
remains.

five months pass and so do the bodies.
fearlessness carried by resentment.
she downloads Tinder in an attempt to keep her heart burning.
it is the wrong flame but she brings home wood anyway.

it is said that a mermaid’s flesh grants immortality
and the songbird of the sea feels it.
greedy, soulless fingers roaming,
reaping.
they don’t stick around long enough
for her to remember their names,
just the smell of liquor and latex.
their false warmth does not defrost her heart
so she wilts. fish out of water.

for a while she can no longer look in the mirror.
all she can see is the girl who burns,
borne on that horrible moment of anger,
daughter of the water turned inferno
a match struck wrong.

she was too young when she sold her voice
in exchange for the sort of happiness
that comes from obedience and conformity.
each step towards her dreams of independence

and unfettered happiness
was taken on a glass-adorned floor,
her family’s kaleidoscope of shattered hopes.
she walked on those tiny knives,
the smile on her face borrowed, not bright.

little songbird dreamed of being herself,
though her bleeding feet paved a scarlet path
for their expectations.
unintentional but titanic chains.
“You are our future,” they promised fiercely,
ravenous, eyes black as their intentions,
“You will be perfect.”
it was her first mountain.
she learned quickly she would
never best it.

so now I say to you, my heart,
to the girl who burns,
you should never cross that mountain,
the one they built of skyscraping expectations for a child
now too grown for their chains,
built from dreams you did not dream.
you need only be enough for yourself.
as for that other peak
your pilgrimage in search of an
insurmountable love--
it is too early to foresee anything
in a sea so vast
and unpredictable.

and you have learned your lesson
with pyromancy. love should not burn too bright,
for eyes ablaze tend toward blindness, anyway.
your fingertips scorched hearts made of wood
too pliant, or too unyielding,
and thin branches that
could not sustain or stand
your vibrant flame.

you once believed in no one and nothing,
lost in a landscape of eternal fog.
“they always leave, little bird”, you said once,
and you have every right to be afraid and look away--
but do not leave yourself either.
so, stay. linger for a while longer,
and wade through the vague, heavy gray.
a world of “what if” is a world of hope, too.

with iron resolve, then, rally yourself!
you have bloomed into a rose
lovely and fierce in your own right.
turn your well-worn eyes to the sea in the sky far above,
remember: the stars falter sometimes too.

one match.
when I was young I prayed that I would never grow up,
that I might always laugh at the way my best friend
pressed her lips to the side of her eggshell white hand
and fabricated a glorious, cacophonous ****
at the Genentech trolleys on Grand Avenue
which obligingly tooted their whistles in response
when we hollered “Jesus loves you” at them
from behind the school’s shuddering, rusted fence.
fourteen years of friendship later, we laugh
at how the lasagna we make at her place
slips and drips with too much cheese
over cups of lukewarm soda
and I find myself glad we have aged well.

two matches.
whoever said money can’t buy happiness
clearly never had to eat discounted Chinese food for a year.
the fried rice swims in oil or drowns in salt and
lettuce droops sadly on my fork. no spine.
I manage to bully my father into getting the BBQ pork instead of the beef and broccoli.
small victories are all we have.
it is said that we tricked Zeus into taking the fat for his altars
instead of the good meat,
but the fat hoards flavor,
even if it has no value.
value, I find, is an opinion,
and I ignore my sister’s warnings
when she tells me not to eat the skin off the fried chicken,
unhealthy but all-too-tasty crunch.

three matches.
the commute to school is rough for the first few weeks,
on the soggy dregs of my last summer paycheck.
morning dew makes the stone seats at the train station
no man’s land.
the mornings grow easier when I learn to admire
the way the train howls when it arrives, demanding attention,
and the way it hums contentedly when it leaves
with a belly full of passengers.
the hour long journey is easier now that I wave
to the man who sits on his porch near Sunnyvale
around 9:20, and at 9:25,
I invent reasons for why someone is growing
a square yard of corn in their backyard.

seventeen matches.
the pains of my past bring laughter now. the last cold breath of winter
washed away by the clean, fragrant air of spring
and the obnoxious dandelions blooming in my front yard
that I make a point to punt when I leave in the mornings.
I thought spite would push me forward, green-hearted, hollow,
but it is my joy at my daily morning bagel
my love for the cheap dining hall pasta
and not the subpar sushi burrito
that sustains me. somehow
the hollow things become hallow.

empty matchbox.
I remember God in the way
that the yellow roses in my front yard rebel,
resisting parching droughts and relentless bugs
fifteen years strong without a drop of water from our hands,
clipped from the neighbor’s rosebush
boldly invading our old backyard in the city.
each season, withered to barren, grayed thorns,
but the sunrise illuminates a single bud
despite the odds.
my hope is, then,
that the coldest winter will always lead
to the bright, golden mornings of spring,
that I might thaw the ice set in your bones from
the chill of ill-fated loves.
it is good to know the grief of death
to savor the joy of life
just as I wish these words
might be your persistent roses.

she was a daughter of the water.
her eyes gleamed like their sapphire depths, though the rare rain that fell from them
was just as salty.

some days, she wished she had never left their cerulean currents,
innocence left behind, fading bubbles in her wake.
longing ate at her heart like acid.

her sister warned her,
but the siren call was too strong.
little songbird of the sea,
called by the melody of the earth.
spiraling notes of emerald leaves
and opalescent, satin clouds
that the sea does not sing.

and so she ascended from the abyssal black
pearls on her neck cold and bright as winter snow,
hope warm and coral pink on her cheeks.

there is no prince for her. she will not wait
for another half-hearted heart to make hers whole.
love-stale eyes rest on the edge of the yellowing page
and she smiles at this story, her favorite.
the little mermaid found joy through her pain,
danced through the wispy clouds,
the swirling winds, and rose with the sun,
beyond the pangs of love.
can she do the same?

wondering, wandering. rubber peels from her soles in flakes
as she skips pebbles aimlessly across the black concrete.
she pauses at the fading crosswalk
and watches the sun hang in the still-blue sky
drooping low, its crest white-hot,
scorching the clouds. it paints them rose pink, lavender blue,
illuminates the edge of the ascendant moon in gold.
the usually mild autumn wind nips her cheek playfully,
urging her along.

the tap of her feet on the pavement is airy and light.
she hums to herself tunes she’s forgotten how to play
on the chipped piano in their moth-rich living room.
a breathless joy, an ember,
sparks in her ribcage.
she has learned the melodies
running through the rain-softened soil
bouncing beneath her heels,
the dance of the city lights in the night,
the symphony of birdsong heralding the waking sun,
the kiss of morning dew on the emerald grass.

I piece together my dreams into a new one,
a stained-glass window refracting and reflecting
countless probabilities,
blithe childhood ideas made strong
by a toolbox filled up over time.
education and foundations.
stories I wrote in my preteen years
are stuffed into molding cabinets
to fly high and wild one day
lying dormant till they catch fire and are reborn.

I no longer pray for freedom. happiness is my freedom,
a choice I did not know I had.
eyes scrubbed clean by salt make for good eyesight,
dust cleared by the whirling monsoons of adolescence.
the thorny path is one of enlightenment and suffering
and I have found my roses despite the blood.

tucked away within a black box,
wrapped neatly in white, waxen paper,
pristine as the day it last kissed my skin
the razor occasionally stirs.

after all these years, I finally manage to ignore its call.