icarus—
curiosity is a fire,
roaring inside your ribcage.
you wonder, and you want,
and the tips of your fingers
stretch themselves
towards the sun—
warm, then hot,
then scorching,
and finally, you plummet.
icarus—
they call you a tragedy,
but tell me,
did your blood not run
liquid gold,
in that moment
the sun’s heat
embraced you?
didn’t the touch
of pure, pure opulence
leave stardust
and embers
embedded in
your skin,
a heavenly dust
adorning your burns?
icarus—
in the sky, as you
dive towards earth,
you glimmer
like glory.
icarus—
charred angel,
did you not feel divine
in the seconds before
you fell?
icarus—
wasn’t the warmth
worth what followed?

atlas—
your shoulders
crack and crumble;
dust and dirt fall from
the corners of your
aching joints; you are
ageing like stone.
your body, quivering,
is not made
of marble,
but the fissures
like tree roots on
your arms glimmer
gold and blue
and green—and
you are forced to
stand still, tall,
sturdy; as if
you were nothing
but a pillar,
reaching up to
heaven, grounded
forever to the earth.
atlas—
the weight of the
world is an anchor
on the curve of
your spine.
shaking, shaking,
like the scattered
rings of saturn—
oscillating.
atlas—
collapse.
atlas—
crumble, fragment;
dream of feathers
and dust and billowing
air, and all that is
light and gentle—
and melt.
atlas—
loosen your fingertips,
let the world slip
from your shivering
hands.
atlas—
even stone
can turn to dust.
atlas—
disintegrate.

i grew
from flowers.
fabric-softener petals
and twirling ivy vines
and quiet dandelions
and ever-sleeping blossoms.
i grew
from oceans.
calmly tossing water
and silent white sand
and slowly-floating seashells.
i grew
from forests.
serene unmoving trees
and soundlessly-swaying grass
and sedated sunlight beams.
i grew
from skies.
silent shooting stars
and twinkling constellations
and ever-so-slightly waning moons.
i grew
from quiet movement
i grew
from sleepy sounds
i grew
from hushed breaths.

the roots of my people
are winding, twisting,
intricate art in themselves.
our skin—
a million shades of
rain-soaked and sun-kissed.
our bodies meld with
our bamboo, stretching
our fingers
endlessly upwards—
our plum blossoms,
resilient through sheets of snow—
our willows,
soft and airy,
swaying in perfect rhythm
with the wind our land breathes.
we are born of nature—
our voices sharp and nimble;
oxygen leaves our lungs
and carves peaks in the sky,
pierces clouds like
the huangshan—
we move
like no other blood,
fast and flying,
fleet-footed,
ever-flowing.
the roots of my people
are painted in
calligraphy pens and ink,
and it runs through
each of us,
as we stand
tall, serene,
in symbolic tradition,
just like our trees.

my bones decay
slowly.
a cobweb spins
in and out,
in and out,
pulling bones
closer, tighter,
snapped.
i am a ghost, i
am the dust of
a burnt-out star,
collapsed,
collapsed,
collapsed.
i am the corpse
of a child, i am
thrown out,
used up,
and death drags
his feet behind me,
the angels turn
their backs and
hang their heads.
and i spin suns
out of dirt,
tapping my feet
and breaking
all my fingers.

don’t you know? your body
is made of stardust—i see
it glimmering in you.
don’t you know? you are
not too much, you are not
too little, you are an
entire world; you are
mountains, you are trees,
you are the gentle-moving
tides and the soft-curving river,
you are the ever-still lake.
don’t you know? the craters
in your skin are no less
beautiful than the ones that
kiss the moon’s surface.
don’t you know? there are
nebulae inside your chest,
and they glow, they glow,
they glow—you are never
alone in the darkness, love.
don’t you know? the night
sky twinkles along you,
the northern lights oscillate
as you breathe.
don’t you know? don’t you
know? you are beautiful;
you are your own galaxy.

i. my chest shivers with my heartbeat—a hummingbird, flapping its wings.
ii. the first spring sunlight, warm rays of melted gold. light falls like a blanket, lucent, scintillating bronze aglow.
iii. redness on skin, marigolds flowering, blossoming pink scattered on cheeks like stardust. a thousand million comets, light and more light.
iv. warm grass beneath my fingers, sprouting up and growing through my body towards the sun.
v. fields of wildflowers. rosy morning sunrise over ocean. light, light, and light, draping over earth like curtains of amber, twinkling. bokeh pouring through forest canopies, a solar sedative, the fauna doze. light, more light, drizzling from sunbeams, riding on the claws of the birds.
vi. warm golden blankets, lulling the world to sleep.

let us speak
of the way death
splinters through a life
before ripping it away.
let us mourn
and kneel on dirt before
the gravestone—
death sows the seeds
of the violets that bloom.
let us hollow
out our chests, reach
our hands through
holes in the lungs,
hoping to grasp air
and receiving nothing.
let us weep
as we clutch our
fingers over wounds,
let the blood soak them
like sunlight. it is all
we have left.

you burst blackberries between
your fingers. blue juices, sweet somehow,
drip down the curve of your wrist, bleed
like ink over the soft lines of the palm,
skin-colored fortune tellers. the spilled
blackberries leave letters in their ink-paths
here; perhaps an anagram of my name.
now sun calls you daughter. she nursed
you in her light-womb, watched history
unfold on earth like a crane stretching
its feathers. dropped you like a blessing
and brought the first sunset, beckoning sky’s
cotton-candy pinks, sugar-coated cream,
freshly-squished blackberry colours. dancing
down your hands still, sweet, saccharine
ink; all earth’s berry bushes stretch their
twig-arms toward you. the apple trees
call you sister, pick you bouquets of
honeysuckle. sun warmed their blossoms,
they say. their smell is smooth and sugared,
melting in your rosy-fingered hands,
like soft slices of daybreak, snippets of
syrupy dawn. you are eve now, stretching
bare skin in twilight, opening love-laden palms to
blooming bushes of roses, plucking them from
their stems like petal-coated candies; the apex of
nature, zenith of earth’s creatures. a thousand
years wax and wane; beyond the limits of time,
you are one with sky, all the sweet seconds in
history condensed. you pop a blackberry
into your mouth, delicate ink-skin bursting.

i slowly cave in on myself
and the sky smells of falling stars—
i can taste it, leaking in through
the cracks. i ascend, like a hot
air balloon, my body filled
with moonlight, the dust
falling off the trail of a comet.
the night is dripping paint,
navy blue and black, the ravens
are cutting holes in the air and
neptune shines through, a minty
frost, ice and starlight. my feet
are far above the clouds—an
icarus floating in the dark,
dark sky, and i reach for cygnus
—no more light pollution here.
lyra plucks its golden strings
and the moon sings a lullaby,
sweet and slow like drops
of mercury. and there, as
stardust glows through my skin,
replaces sore organs with light
and swallows each aching bit,
i sleep.

i often feel like hollow light. If you
were to touch me, there would be
nothing but a hand passing through
a few swirling luminescent particles—
i am a ghost pretending to be human.
i admit that this is hard for me to say–
writing without wrapping words
in warmth is unsafe, risk-laden; my
fingers freeze up, unmoving,
suddenly unknowing. there are
a few moments each day when i lose
all my speech, and five, ten, fifteen
years of learning how to hold myself
together with shaky hands vanish,
swallowed like lifeboats sinking. i
would like to tell the truths buried in
my stomach—like cutting open the sky
and watching all the stars fall through
torn fabric—but each time my
words fail me, and so I will never call
myself a poet. perhaps one of the
most difficult things is writing
without metaphors—i can’t make
fear or pain or the shaky breaths
that happen after you’ve cried for too
long sound soft or lovely or like deep
ocean tremors, and now i am no longer
an artist, i am just the raw, bare soul
of a person who never quite got the
hang of stability. still i am attempting
to decipher how all these people
keep their feet on the ground, so if
you find anything for me to saw the
wings growing from my ankles off with,
let me know.

i’m not good at writing happy poems.
my hands are clumsy and so,
so scared—see, joy is
a vast foreign light,
spreading warmth through
fingertips, skeletons, souls.
and when, dear sky,
was the last time i saw
the dawn?
even to close my eyes
and ride on waves of slumber
is a risk
i fear to take—for what if
when i wake,
the sun and all his lullabies
are gone?
no,
i can’t take
another year in the dark.
and if i do,
if i do sleep,
or rest
or trust
or hope—
please, poem
(although messy,
crumbling,
soft),
keep the sun
with me.

i am going to tell you a story.
but first, you need to look up—
no, further. further. further.
beyond the ceiling, beyond the
buildings, beyond everything
you know.

eject yourself from your body
and look up
until you can see the stars for
what they are—jewels embedded
in blue velvet, stitched there by
some god’s hand, or orbs of
burning hydrogen
destroying themselves. let’s just
admit it here—we do not know
what they are, the things
we call the stars. does it matter?
they decorate the night. they
sing me lullabies when i cannot
sleep—they will for you, too,
if you promise to listen.

listen to me, too: feel
the universe. feel all the atoms
moving around you, in you, over
you—your hands, the sun, all the
things that have made you hide.
feel them. they are nothing.
feel yourself. you are nothing.
feel the universe. the universe
is nothing. dead or alive, infinite
or creeping towards an ending—

listen to me. stars still implode
when you cry. the earth
does not stop its motion,
the galaxies keep running
further and further away from
us. i know fear, and loneliness,
and the end of the world—and
you do, too. but listen to me.

andromeda does not care that you
throw your voice into the night.
cassiopeia still blinks in the
sky, even when everything you know
on this tiny, wet rock is
breaking itself apart—the universe
will mould all those atoms into
something new. listen to me and
everything will listen to you.

you are part of this existence,
right down to the quarks
that make up your fidgeting fingers
and the electrons that buzz
in your eyes. the night sky
will swallow you up when you
need somewhere to sleep,
if you let it. do not be
afraid. do not be lonely.

you are okay. you are okay. you
are okay because the universe
stands still, with its arms open
for you.

the woods are home
and i am a pine,
disintegrated and reborn
in the shape of a girl.
“come home,” they say—
i already am, at rest in
the trunk of an oak.
closer to the source of
my atoms than i have
ever been. each tree
has a different voice—
some high, some low,
some smooth, some
rhythmic, all with the
cadence of a lullaby.
“you are home, you
are home,” they say,
and all the leaves rustle
in the wind and slowly,
slowly, i fragment,
fracture, splinter,
shatter—into something
tall, sturdy, reaching to
the sky, reaching to the
soil, reaching through the
earth. the woods
are home and i am
a pine, disintegrated
in the shape of a girl
and reborn into the
arms of the forest.

weakness
is an anchor tied
to the air in my lungs.
anger
is the scars and scabs
on my knees—
blue and purple and
melancholy.
fear
is the ghost
in the depths of my
shadow. he
leaves no room
for the sun.
sadness
is the curve
of my spine, the
bruise on my chest,
the shaking shaking
shaking of my hands,
the stars i pin up
each night
and the moon
lingering in the
sky through morning,
never swallowed by
daylight.

one night, when the stars had burned all their fire
away and the air had turned to thick, strangling
molasses, i became curious about anatomy.
with a handful of pens—dripping ink like
butterflies stabbed through, stopped and static—
i picked apart the ghost-bodies sitting in the corners
of my room. in depression i found my heart, rotted.
in the chambers of anxiety’s unease i found my lungs.
between them both, held in the gaps between their
shaky bones, messily melding their shivering hands and
rattling cave-chests, i found shredded shards of my mind,
so darkened and charred i could hardly make them out to be
my own, remnants of something that once glowed.
the sky weighted down, the blanket of clouds shifting
into trapping echoes of iron and steel, and the desolate,
dust-buried rooms of my skull sung, littered with the
dregs of light—hungry and hollow. the night was quiet,
deeper than all the world’s caves, the roof of stars suddenly
suspended above the reach of the tallest tower. the moon
was absent, hiding from the sight of impromptu autopsy.
like amber, the air trapped the world, froze it in time—
scrambling insects stopped their struggle, gave in to
stillness. missing half my organs, i could not resuscitate
the sun.

i live on blood,
they say, i drink it
like good wine.

words trip on my tongue,
they say they
stumble over the guilt
of the murders
accusations
piling on me like honours,
each body another
triumph.

i killed the prisoners
in september,
they say,
and now i dine with aristocrats.

i know what a trial is
now, put me
before the trappings
and call me a dead man.

i know what an end is
now, put me
before the blade
and let the people hear
the fall and thud.

mob around the tumbril
blood on the fields
throw our bodies in the pile
springtime dirt
and let the earth eat us up.

no martyr’s death,
no stoicism.
my head a guilty vessel
to rot.

the revolution sheds no tears,
they say,
swallows its children
one by one.

burning is not answering—
not a problem,
silence me instead.

here it comes—
the edges of my frail mind
falter and fade. dreadful closet walls,
***** and mangled, sick yellow paper,
turn, twist, tighten,
swallow whole.
through the dingy apartment esophagus
i am thrown into the stomach of the street
suffocating summer sweat
like swirling bile.

in the sky the sweltering sun sighs,
settling down for sleep. oh, this world!
a fever seeps inside me now, rustling
the detritus buried in the murk of my skull,
the **** that i am.
fitful and convulsive machinery,
spasmodic anatomy,
land conquered by fear.

oh, sorry sight! napoleon on his knees,
brought down to beg. watchful eyes glimmer
along the streets, marbles shimmer
in sunset light, piercing yellow orbs
catlike and silent.
ants, ants, ants! their words and whispers—
criminal, knave, pariah!

the moon, all round and bright, sits plump
in the black sea like a kopeck.
nighttime air drinks me, drains and digests
dregs of breath from convulsing lungs.
here i lie, at the assail and besiege
of fever-filled dreams,
again in the mouth of the beast, awaiting
the gnash of its teeth.