—After Michael Frazier

 

Who told you to do 

              these kinds of things?               You

       try memorizing the

names of        flowers, and

       Then you are

                                   ruined. 

 

                     Our souls melted in sunlight,

                     a black coat dumping the bodies

so gently it 

       becomes a               rite of passage

              hands clasped still in 

                     devastated opal, perched on

                     the hood of a 2010 burgundy Ford.

You don’t say

       I love you 

because you were

                                   raised better than that.

                     Don’t do what I

              did, man

                                   coughing yourself

out

       into mutilated riverbanks

                                          into magnificent Woolworths aisles

like a prayer to an unrisen god

       for which there will never be a temple

                                          —To an unrisen weather balloon

He        gave me        letters and then I

             made paper cranes

snipping         off their little heads

          onto the tiles. Thunk as

              the syllables fall off and then

a white shower in the swollen

                  kitchen.        Thunk   as

       my eyelids were ripped

open like broken seams

   and blood dotted the bouquet;

 

                                          yes, I became something

                                                        so threadbare and clumsy

that        violets were pried 

              from my

purple fingers and then I

                          was                                                         blessed

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Sharon Zhang is an Asian-Australian, Melbourne-based poet and author. Her work has been recognised by Anti-Heroin Chic, Antithesis Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a mentee at Ellipsis Writing and an editor at Polyphony Lit. Outside of writing, she enjoys collecting CDs, scrolling endlessly on her phone, and thinking about Hegel a touch more than that which is necessary. She is the poet laureate of pretentiousness and using the word “body” when any other noun would work instead. Skin. Limbs. Humanness. Tablecloth.