By Evy Shen
of time. when the hand strikes and you’re not here
to receive it. i don’t want this leap of faith
slipping organs into a benthic knit, our matching shrouds,
mid-drive sticky-cold strangle of jellyfish. in the shower,
it’s always the walls getting smaller and not my screams.
spindly pipes dousing a tremolo of truncation, sickens me that
i ask morning to undress what’s left of myself into something
foreign. i don’t want to feel the dissonance in synthesis,
the curling and crooning. for honesty, i denature this defense,
bonds that fence fear from water. sorry, mother, don’t
you know it’s not the same? reflection atop tide, wind with
cattails, how it feels to meet but not unite as one. and this war, this
unfinishing, is one i’ll always trail until i learn to fasten grief as a weapon.
so for now, find me silent, unsound. tracing your gulls to heaven.
Evy Shen is a high school senior from Georgia. Her writing has been published or forthcoming in Penn Review, Passages North, Longleaf Review, Half Mystic Journal, HOBART, Jet Fuel Review, and Blue Marble Review, among others. When she is not writing, she is outside with her family enjoying God’s beautiful nature. She loves One Direction and rain.