Assimilation
I. My name is too hard for you to pronounce so I changed it. My hair is too wild so I tamed it. My clothes are too strange so I wear yours. My skin is too dark so I lightened it. My tongue is wrong so I cut it out. […]
Poetry
Athena Holds Up a Mirror to Strength
Girl, you best stop setting yourself on fire, you may be the phoenix, but these bones aren’t kindling to keep others warm— your spine isn’t a bridge you need to burn, and you aren’t a consequence, Empress: remember who you are. Woman, you a hundred rivers, each one gathering itself carefully, unhurried, unhampered, considerate […]
Νόστιμον Ήμαρ
Once upon the august moon, we lived and loved Earth. We’re lucky, you say, as you trace Cassiopeia for the last time with a sigh curled around your lips. You already miss this. We tasted her intestines and found them too bitter, overflowing with loss. Leaving is the thing that makes sense when […]
behind the self-help section
behind the false wall lies all the burned books— banned and abandoned they shimmer, glittering in their illicitness ghost words that send shivers down unknowing shoppers’ spines when these patrons traverse too close to the self-help section covered in goosebumps hairs standing straight on their arms these readers don’t realize that they’ve brushed up against […]
Hungry Ghost
My girlfriend became a hungry ghost on the 4th of August, twig-necked with skin as wet as gasoline, needlepoint mouth unable to keep down anything. We met on a language exchange app, me the English teacher who’d swooped into Hongdae like a sudden wind, her the ulzzang who dreamed of opening a BBQ restaurant […]
Other Worlds to Save
the girl sometimes slipped off the brocaded ambassadorial robes she wore through endless negotiations with more alien species than she ever thought could exist she was often too busy to miss Earth, her parents, corn dogs but when melancholy descended she pulled on the ratty t-shirt and jeans she had worn when she left […]
The Death of the Gods
It was only her eyes that changed; gently, until one day she saw about her not grace but men: fragile in their frailties, their palms’ spread wingspan just as wide as her own hands. They were born together, youths together, fought arms linked in the grass-shot fields of Troy, grew tall together: wan shadows of […]
A tenjō kudari (“ceiling hanger” yōkai) defends her theft
at night I hover above the beams you’ve hammered between heaven and your spread silk coverlet the air, which is nothing to you, is everything to me the wood, which is something hard to you, is nothing to me I slip fingers beyond the pine knots and holding on to breezes with my […]
Who Do You Think You Are
You ask as if there is shame in thinking, as if I am sure of my thoughts, but I think what I can scarcely say. A child’s book of riddles: I have lost myself on purpose. I am made of an alloy that your world does not possess. I am vast and delicate. I […]
Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Belle
I wish I didn’t hunger for this so badly that I would have one so unripe, my plea for it out of season. We should have both waited. But we simply couldn’t be sated by patience. Wanting pretty things is hunger, too, and having is feasting, denied by few. A rose alone was all my […]