After Franny Choi 

There’s the dark sky. There’s the falling rain. Blood on the ground, turning mud red. The dorm room, pulsing with periphery light—Jersey, shocked with dying. Chemtrails’ thousand hands the milky veins of a clementine in summer. Every apocalypse starts and ends with hurt; the tail-devouring dream knows itself as a daughter in how it inherits this, if nothing else. 

:: 

In July, the upper rafters of my house burst alive with glass gardens. The oak I clung to in kindergarten, teaching suspension, was now melted and winding. Imagine: the anatomy of a twenty-first century regret as a smattering of translucent gardenias. All of your body’s aching blood as fertilizer. Teenage amber saying, let’s immortalize this, too. 

:: 

It’s just inhumane to lose this much, croons Will Wood. We trudged among clamoring birch incarnated, flaking papyrus in October. Lemon orchard as liquid fire, or maybe midnight tar. Jie spits, so you’re just letting your sickness sit in you. Worse, then, trying to fix it myself. Like—see the old rowboat? From when I was six. Hull breached and upended by melted glaciers, rewound for the metaphor. 

:: 

America smiles at me, placid, lifeless. It is all starting to hurt again. I hold onto it. :: 

Any mountainous life is the way to go nowadays, Ma claims. The Dolomites, bare—blue-breasted—hazy with ozone the shade of asphyxiation. Appalachian air, escaping into my ribs. I haven’t been to 黄山 in years; sometimes I build an altar out of honeysuckle in late spring and try to trace every ridge in the dirt, make a miracle out of remembering. 

:: 

Ma says the end of the world is only the end if you believe it. I tell her I’ve made a lot of things worse over the years. Lately, when I’m trying to fall asleep, I’ve been asking for heaven’s aesthetic preferences on dying. In November, a bundle of marigolds—jaundice yellow—punctured the woodwork in my bedroom ceiling and closet. Speared clean through my favorite sweater. It hasn’t answered me yet. 

:: 

For the razed orchard. For the dead birds. For the overgrown rowboat, the altar-turned-grave. Every little hurt, cradled in the sky’s decayed chest, becoming another blooming bruise to press down on and worsen.

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黄山 — Yellow Mountain, located in China