a literary magazine.
Valedictorian Speech, Apocalypse, I fell ill in English class, Writing Poetry in Menstrual Blood
Valedictorian Speech
And I know child prodigies never live past 18, but you’ve
looked asphyxiated and a little lost since the 9th grade
inventing combinations of initials to dedicate your victories to
while Chi Ta-wei and Sylvia Plath collect dust by your bed
Familiarity with a new city, summers full of heat and storm
The thunder you find most pacifying, gives you confidence &
helps you erase the warmth only found beneath rural lamps
and amber snow. You kill and regret it not once, not even when you
remember the day your mother came to the piano, two small bottles
dangling between her fingers. “Let's paint our nails after your lesson.”
& plummeting off your blue and pink bike into the grassy hill
it’s not like you’ll ever get the chance to fall in anything else.
Makes you a little sadistic, so you start poking at
pretty metaphors until they collapse into piles of ash
like a real city girl, leaving endings unburied and unmourned,
standing in this little row of black gowns with skinny ankles
to choose a prompt for your final quiz, either:
“Was it worth it?” or “How could I have done better?”
Apocalypse
Should
every other person in the city of Chicago evaporate
twisted and plucked away by the senselessness of poets
all the white men who try to eat your lips when they
kiss you, and all the churches and their crosses
abandoning the bridges and beach, naked as a blueprint
finally tears away the old girl and imprints this fresh version
in your irises, which I would flood with the brightness of
headlights or a breaking fever, for the pleasure of offending
your delicate sensibilities and fragile composition
if only I could locate you in this ghost town
& I would swallow 7 or 8 pomegranate seeds without complaint
to prove that Persephone was only a flawed first draft
let you perform a spell on me, devil disguised as an exorcist,
so I haunt all the empty bars for several noons
until the blue sky starts to boil with large white stars
soft and strange like blisters, and following their trails of pus
called constellations, I would finally find you in the park
trying to warm yourself with memories of the people who had
evaporated.
I fell ill in English class
and fled to the bathroom to leave skin cells on its tiles
avoid ibuprofen so I could be diagnosed with masochism
ponder the depth of the ache within my body
feel the edge of my belly for a switchblade opening
its jaw of teeth to bite affectionately at my 13th rib
a phantom pain, trying so hard to hurt for something
not here, makes me a true, cruel poet.
Writing Poetry in Menstrual Blood
for lack of a pen during the fever
collect it in a bottle and lace it
with cyanide from your nightstand
become round and swaying with poetry
to avoid stating the truth, plucking out
your tongue to avoid choking on it
reread and lick blood from your fingers
with satisfaction, forgetting its cyanide
watching spittle mix with your blood
in the toilet’s porcelain mouth
as you bed the earliest symptoms of
producing spells in garamond instead of
eggs and ink your veins instead of
sperm, welcoming blue asphyxiation
softly
Bio:
Nora Sun is a Chinese-American writer living in Chicago. She loves language, iliac crests, and brevity's talent for breeding mystery.