by Fifi W., 18
(I)
for you, i will finally use the word love in my poems.
i wish someone had told me: never fall for a girl who
reads AO3. she’ll tell you that she wishes she had gotten
into coding for her Tumblr blog and you will spend
the rest of your English major years at college
wondering if a pretty STEM boy is leaning over her
shoulder right now. S, i hope you never read this. don’t discover
the glass ramekin of washed raspberries under your
bed. only if you’d let me, i’d clean your wounds & gauze
the linen of your stomach. i’d say goodnight to the
monster in your closet before rubbing out my fingerprints
from your bedroom light switch. two large bubble teas
under the Maryland blues. i’ll fold the Uber receipt
into a paper plane & watch it bypass every star before
dozing off in your lap (the plane, not me, i’m looking at you
as a nebula burns away my feet). your college friend’s corgi
has warmer teeth but i would kiss the blister at your
heel & all the invisible scars & not look away when the word
hurt cocoons into an action verb. scream into my heart; S, the echos
ceased-fire when i met you & there are now Christmas lights
& lovers on tiptoes peering at store displays as their
breaths fog up the glass in the shape of pearly cornelias. i’ll
trace each broken vessel on your arm, upstream your
ventricles to the cello calluses at the tip of your fingers & there,
i love you for your cracked nail polish & punctuated Poshmark
reviews. (yes, that mascara looks really good on you even if it costs
fifty-five dollars too much) the kind of seismographic love
a locket cannot smother without trembling. we come
from violent wombs but believe me when i say
that bottled shipwrecks are never far from sapphire suns
& one day you will wake up to an eden of geranium blooms.
i wish someone had told me: you could be at the right
place & right time & still be the wrong person to write this
poem, but S, i’m not letting you drown, even if that means
only one of us survives in the end. i sleepwalk like a stringed
puppet at twilight & i hope you dream of petals by any other
name. we can peel back the wallpaper & unknot the gray
wires & break the snowglobe in perfect halves. blackberry
juices on your lips. S, i would hold your wrist until Lucifer
breaks his left horn out of love. for love. it’s always for love.
(II)
she says (thx i have barely survived) with the parenthesis like
a crime scene taped shut, a mummified form of violence
so forgivably gentle, second-handed colors tipped through
tongues & mosaic glasses no longer arise next winter. S,
i look at you and drown in chlorine. back of your freshmen
hands licked with black sharpie & yet nothing quite as dark as
your tangerine lines on my college essay files: the idea of us
intertwined in the second dimension would’ve meant something if not
for my own trembling blunts. you can bite a bloated organ but love,
what do you do with an asylum that was never yours? i rest the
bottom of my palm on the vibrations of your laugh. it’s raining again
& we ignite our soft ends until bones unhook from molded
flesh & you lobotomize my occipital lobe with metal
wires from your mask. i wish someone had told me: girls who call
themselves boring are the angels you die for in the end. S,
when i talk to you i cannot imagine endings of any sorts, only
the sun turning sweet on your skin. marigold cursor roams across the
page & the moon rotates in flames & i tell her how easy you
are to love. go back to the crime scene & lift my chest from my
scraped knees & uncover the corgi dead in my lap. when i said
you weren’t boring this is what i meant: five years into the future,
my unclenched jaw meets your untangled hair. i tell you that Chanel
blush never did you justice. you admin your RPG Facebook pages
& i write poems about you, still. S, i love you in a way we don’t
have to change, in a way that doesn’t demand us to linger either way.
i reread the editing history of my college essays & strikethrough
every word like picking embers out of coal. all the moons
combust in the blink of an eye. sometimes i wish you had not
used a permanent marker on me. polaroids line up on the inside
of my throat like some sort of Wiccan ritual & your face is
blurred in all but one. neon blue delights, his countenance
reflected on your skin. a wanted poster for the death of a
killer. for you i’ll unwrap the bandages & let my limbs fall
off the ledge. there will be no blood & you will be happy.
i wish someone had told me: forgiveness comes when you
want it least. the moon tilts off its orbit but you don’t notice
our room in cinders. i picture us at the beginning of the
world, cracked pendants and blackened tongues and gilded and
golden. in broken chords, i tell her sure i’m available wednesday
afterschool & in parenthesis (i love you, i love you.)
(III)
side A. i wish someone had told me: you’ll never understand
what it is about girls in ponytails until you see her
mid-September in the room with no lights. two packs of
Oreos flicker bright blue inside my schoolbag, the only
imagery i let survive in words washed up under the
sun. formulas between our hands heap nullified & you
fall past my skin like scalpel through butter like
butter on sourdough like bread and butter cutting a
hole in
a lover’s stomach. i rearrange my bones to catch you on the other
side but in this carnation–a handful of chocolate cookies
will have to suffice. S, i’m not scared of dark rooms
anymore. your violent storms guide me ashore and i would
love the monsoons you don’t know the names of & i
would love the blizzards before they flood our horizon. my
monsters cower at your glance. you clasp me between palms
& i crawl into your skin, almost like a parasite but it
is still my tongue that gets eaten in the end. any man
could paint you Mona Lisa but for you, i’d assemble
a Louvre for every poet that wished they were alive to
write your morbius beauty & i’d restore Alexandria ash by
ash as if its spectacle rivaled a painted nail on your left
hand. side B. i wish someone had told me: you’re going to
see her in glasses and bunned-up hair and rewrite your
personal statement for the fourth time. in my dream i run like
sheep & see you seated across from him at a kind of fancy
dinner; over his shoulders you tell me metaphors about
appetizers that go on and on but all i could taste in my
mouth was raw beef & the realization that i’ll never figure
you out. S, i’m terrified of looking away because i forget
that you’re real and i think you’d disappear as soon
as i glance away. you coat my arteries with lash
serum. (sixty-eight dollars for the weight of a human
heart & i
let you cancel on me with a two-hour notice.)
another piece of the sky falls down on us and i run
out of
Biblical imageries to compare this to. writing for the
magazine that two of my English teachers have read,
maybe i do want to be found, eating up the most
tolerable fragility i’ve ever felt. my love language is
editing an essay with you, S, but i want you in the most
unheavenly way; i love you more than i have left to
bleed.
Taipei, Taiwan
Bridge Ink 