MAD & MOONLY: WINTER 2020
JESSICA XU
JESSICA XU
DEPARTURE
I leave my love on the doorstep. I drive
miles of memory. The softest parts
of yesterday are your hands, dusk unmade
from light, mouths releasing a name
into an ending. November will forgive us
for the promised pleasures of smaller days,
the way they fell to unlivable tomorrows.
I could have washed the sheets
& watched time dry. I could have cleaned
the shelves & learned to collect dust myself.
I could have slipped on the ring & reached
for another man. How we became old & unkind
for familiar bodies: Watching the hours
settle aimless & gray between the spaces
of where we lay on unforgiving nights.
I travel the country.
I knock on my father’s door.
I mother a girl. I dream of the monarch
butterfly flickering on your shoulder,
return to kinder recollections. Our footsteps
upon the old boardwalk. Your voice
& the book of poems. The movies
we screened at midnight. Mornings left
uncooked on white plates. How this & all else
fades from cruelty, draws to the unseen,
the way the moon punctures its light
into the dark & I forget your small angles,
forget how to carve your face into knowing.
AN ENDING
I wear the days like fabric. I watch
them stretch across my shoulder. Mother says
I’ve outgrown smaller dreams, the treehouse
& its imagined magic. I find a doe, give it
my name. I stay close to every pockmarked
surface of land, find water-soaked stones & confuse
its sheen for unmarked gold. I could stay godly.
Childlike & unsheathed. Soft & moon-heavy.
Between the river valley & the shifting sky,
with my thumbs pressed against every scattering
of light, the heat like a boil I trap under glass jars,
old crates.
Mother, I can hear the grooves in my voice,
the way it curves & dampens deeper. The way
a boy muscles out of a boy, the way the sky
learns how to bruise & bleed. & so my brother
teaches me how to sharpen the knife, how to open
the rabbit. & so I sinew the shape of my hand
into vein and knuckle. The river crumples
& recrumples silk water, imitates the sound
of everything that it drowns. Tonight, the bonfire
feeds on the rabbit & its bones, curls its smoke
into a crueler grin. My brother tracks the doe
within the brambles, teaches me to turn archer
for everything I love.
JESSICA XU is a junior in high school living in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has been honored by the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the National Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poetry can be found in magazines such as The Rising Phoenix Review, the Soothswarm Journal, The Ellis Review, and she is an editor for The McKinley Review and poetry reader for Bitter Melon Magazine.