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SALT
BY EMILY ZHANG
Richard Montgomery High School, ’16
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Honorable Mention
When I spit white and dawn my mouth is clean.
I touch myself where he touched me. I touch
a myth about a dancing river, a copper fist.
I stick my fingers into the river to feel like a glass
balloon. When he touched me I was full
of spit. I do not know how to talk empty, talk
backwards. In a horror movie a finch falls
out of an ocean. Someone is hungry and the sky
moves damp and slow. I am never full. When
it is dark out the sky closes itself like a window.
STORY FOR THE SALT
BY EMILY ZHANG
Richard Montgomery High School, ’16
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Honorable Mention
I smile ugly when the sky looks like spilled gasoline
and you cannot do anything about it. It is impossible
to burn something transparent. There are birds blooming
in the river and no one talks about it. I want to live someplace
bigger than myself. A house burning with the quickness
of water. In July you gave me a bowl of spat out cherry pits
and I gave you a dead bird. Now you are taking it all
back, flood back to the mouth, fish back to the mangroves
that smell like sweetness and light. The sky looks like a mouth,
a mirror. It has a slow storm in its palms and it tastes
like salt, like forgetfulness. I forgot the rules of the world
that complain when rivers don’t move. The name of a silent
thing. I will call it a hunger that’s just now nosing for breath.
