CLOSE READING
by ZIYI YAN
after Adrienne Rich
From moment to moment, sleet makes the dead air:
I wait for each shiver of confession
and its long ache. All day I ask nothing
of the book though it lay cold on my knees:
I finger the waterlogged left-hand
and coax myself into its weight.
There is no better way to deliver me:
I used to uproot so much grass.
I still want to lick the full back of the next train seat,
or finish War and Peace.
The tracks have just been touched. Metal slides back
under me and I try to imagine a dying soldier
under the infinite sky. Each time there is the same margin left,
some small motion unaccounted for: I do everything too hard
and don’t know if it is any good. Someone changes seats
to watch my reflection in the window, I think.
I picture young lovers aligning their eyeballs
to be exactly parallel; when I can’t decide
what the soldier’s face looks like,
I know for sure I will love him. After this,
the river thins into itself. From nowhere
in particular, gears crush themselves to motion.
Russia, 1820: a live girl congeals into motherhood.
I think real love strives for a definite shape.
Hacked to death, the man’s guts are unreadable
as the rest of him. I am on the last train home,
my mind in my hands, in tatters. I refuse
to write about where I come from: the page
is see-through and I am always coming back.
This is where he introduces the already-lost battle.
This is where it began to rain. I emerge
as a neutered thing: the words barely touch.
Over and over, I cut through without becoming
and bring myself into the same world,
into a life I have unmade.
LIKE PEOPLE
by ZIYI YAN
Yes I have it all. Always a new poem, a bigger house. I am your only friend
who can debone a leaf along its veins or drain a flower without breaking it.
To unfurl a fist, I start by making a fist. I place my knuckles above yours,
then pry inward past your nails, past the pads of your fingers. This summer,
your dad hit you until you hurled your whole room down a stairwell. I rub
your scalp more and more gently, searching for a gap in your skull. Yes,
I’ve had men before you. I’ve felt my head rock off their shoulders
as I fell asleep. At a store in 山西, an apple tumbles into place. For hours
after, women pass me to pat my thigh or offer another apple. Of course
I have my family’s love. They shush each other by my door; inside, I stop
writing to take nudes. You scroll through my phone in bed; a cat grates
too hard against the sidewalk. I have nowhere to put my eyes. The last time
I cleaned my room, I remembered there’s no such thing: we just relocate
our filth. I scratch the last line of dirt into my nail, then scrape it on my teeth.
Then: swallow? I don’t think of how the poem will open. My great aunt
could not walk: her smaller toes bound, then pared off. I wrap my feet
in a scarf to imagine how it feels, but only recall the unwinding; you stare
down my nails until they look like a dead woman’s nails. Yes,
I am your only friend who looks nothing like their parents. By sunset,
we break into backyards and bully children. Yes, I would take part
in a hazing ritual, have spent the night pouring beer on shivering friends,
knighting them with sticks, making them sing. In this house, my mom
pinned me down and forced boxes of cream to my mouth, begging me
to grow. I tell you about sobbing so hard, my stomach kept its rhythm
longer than the sound. Instead of wringing dry, my eyes splayed apart–
the world shot straight through. We watch a snake eat a full litter
of rats to bid the poem come: after murder, she curls into herself, nest-like.
I stare in the glass, in you. Could you join me in this prodding, awkward
fury? I am no parasite; I’m already everywhere. Clusters of small holes
in socks, in skin. The bowels, the stomata– the centers of most things
are horrifying if you look close enough. I break my towel by squeezing
too hard, and history is over: the continents stuck in their specific shape.
Instead of a tunneled need: this flat space. Say, in the forest’s open light,
i become a crowd. With one hand, you climb my rib; in this house,
I turn on all the sinks, which means nothing. I vacuum the rug apart
and revise to nonsense: the snake yawns open. the baby gropes her throat
for hidden light. The sun’s center is dark to our eyes: the nuclei swallowed
to nothing– the inverse of dying is also like dying. At the end, I write
the same line: with us, there is no center. Clenched to the screen,
we swallow over and over. Yes, I am here before you. Take note of my
curtains: the too-wide window, the useless drawing and redrawing. On the
floor, the sun is cut in equal blocks. Obviously I am young. In an almost-
imagined hometown, I traced myself with every life I could find. I barely
see bugs before killing them; my family knows every way of refusal.
Some girls barely left the house. One sat so long, a thin hair would snake
from her chin before she got up. It takes years to realize this is also a kind
of life. I was in the bath, shaking loose from an old body. I was watching
rain blow slant against the window. Just as my hair shot down the drain,
I felt so close to the poem. Is this what it means to finally know another?
To pass things again and again without becoming them. After all this
aligning: to find the right wall or person, and walk straight through.
Ziyi Yan (闫梓祎) is a student at Princeton University. Her work is published in American Poetry Review, The Adroit Journal, Quarterly West, The Harvard Advocate, Poetry Northwest, Rust & Moth, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. The founder of The Dawn Review, Ziyi was the 2024-2025 Youth Poet Laureate of Connecticut. https://ziyiyan.carrd.co/
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