Lily Zhou
Lily Zhou is a high school junior from the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes about girlhood and dead rabbits, and believes that the best writing unnerves the reader, rather than restricts itself to what is easy or comfortable. She was once convinced that she wanted to be a software engineer, and thus attempted to write a series of poems based on STEM concepts and equations. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, and SOFTBLOW.
Creation Myth with Skin
In the history lesson, the goddess Nüwa stretches herself across all corners of the ocean, trades
her body for a veined glacier & I dream
about translation, the fruit of my skin pared
& shuttered into ribs thin enough to fit
into the marrow of the earth. I tell Nüwa
about the bullets stacked along my spine
& she tells me the best martyrs are the ones
with too much spit & no mouth. I know
that the best way to make teeth
against the ocean is to drench the salt
out of hunger. I know that to be hungry
is to surface the beer bottle with a knot
of red meat. The meat belongs to Nüwa
& is boneless, sells for far more than this earth
I cleave for profit. Nüwa tells me there is nothing
in this world that cannot be swallowed,
including the block of ice preserved in her jaw.
In response, I show her the white of my arm,
how the fruit makes seeds against my skin
& Nüwa tells me about her bones, the ocean
lipping the soft from her body. I know
that the cleanest part of Nüwa is the map
of skin stretched beyond the coast & I admit
I do not know how to be anything but soft.
Haibun in Sea Salt
We are approaching shore now & still my hands stink of forest. The fisherman at the dock skins a sea bass & pretends it is his mother. I press my lips to the sail & pretend it is my lover. I want it to be a lifetime ago & still a war hero. I want the birthmark on my throat to be the place where they marked me when they lined all the prisoners for execution, some island off the coast of the Pacific. The girl I was and still am: bayonets gleaming like rows of teeth, arcing against the sheen of sunlight. I want to turn fish, to strip the forest from my body & wear the scales of the sea bass as a prize.
Girl stooped down in mud,
her body turned star & salt.
Every sail points home.
