Summer and all the spoils of war—red sanctuary and spit and sunbirds dead between my legs. The boy I never saw again said I have doomed myself always searching for something to sabotage what I love. All the blood drained from the spider lily before the first breath. Petals the color of teeth crushed into earth the color of tar. Pressed inside a Muji notebook by my mother whose father only knew how to rhyme my name with Gethsemani, for the Catholic religion he converted half our family into.

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At night, I set fire to the last true city in a country that clogs my memory, to follow the birds trading one burning tree for the next. Two truths and a lie—I am sometimes a girl; sometimes a saint; a woman on the 42^nd Street platform who tries to speak and washes down the tracks. The women who look like her giving birth to dung beetles, each the size of a sun. Two backlit streets forked at the tail end of my spine. Every vertebra sold cheap each week as sour candy. Thirty-three shards of stained glass. The man from the subway tries to twist them back in, every Sunday. 

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Every cell in my body replaced by rain. I watch TikToks of white girls sharpening the shape of their eyes. I fill my Pinterest board with barbed lashes and bad eyeliner. Ferns sprout from my fingertips when I hit ten hours of screen time, eyeballs embedded in nails. I consider the wayward scar of land from my apartment window, the blue curtains within the blue house, dirty laundry flung on the grass. The speck of my father dragging his feet back home.

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Girl only eats spoiled fruit. She boards a carousel of jade horses. They die every fourth rotation, shudder back to life on seven. Midnight and everything tastes like broken glass. The moon is a grape peeled and peeled until translucent. Girl is most afraid of misjudging the distance between herself and someone else. She whittles down the horses, down to the bone, down to smooth green skulls. They bleed the color of plum blossoms. The reporters will call it acid rains and extreme weather. The horses spin so fast they become a halo cinching the earth. 

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At Starbucks, a woman comes in everyday and asks for a grilled cheese sandwich. She says it’s the only thing her son, in the hospital down the street, will eat. John gets a tall Signature coffee with two pinks. I call a cab for a woman who doesn’t remember her own name. I only got yelled at twice on Saturday. After I quit, we watch Lady Bird and that’s when I never want to watch an American coming-of-age movie again. When I come to see you in the summer, we watch another one. In the movie, our bodies are two thin mints exchanging flesh.

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My father tells me of a Chinese afterlife flashing with lilies like teeth, the tide spilled rancid and

flaunting its drowned. I believed him. Could I help it? My whole life, everything that glowed was gone by morning. There’s something to be said for how every soul on the planet weeps the same color once you turn the lights off. When they bury you in a field where flowers overlap for centuries, corpse washed clean by chlorophyll, I will wear snakes around my ankles like garden hoses. I will imagine fireflies lining the future where I wake up in a world without my mother. A scene horrible enough to hold, the lake dark and bruising with bodies. Don’t you hear it. Dusk and more rain than rot, us shimmying ourselves from the earth, bright and boneless, miraculous and so very good.

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