A White Girl Told Me

Xujia Guan, Canada

When a white girl told me I don’t know Virginia

With her ivy regrown through my tendons, around my bones

Her Big Ben chimes tuned

to my chink heart beating timid

The London mist a thread of cursive on my palm

Clarissa’s roses in my nails and soliloquies

rubbed into balm

With the lighthouse searing marks

behind my retinal veins

Of Lily painting by the waves.

When a white girl told me I don’t know Emily —

Not with my soul throng in feathers, filled with song —

I have my handprint on the cornice in the ground, my carriage

trotting towards eternity, His pallid fingers on my gown

When her Fly melts in my mouth —

While I dance in purple, victor’s nectar dipped in sweet

And I know I, with my thin black eye(s)

spent dry my wild nights, ‘till the silence came

of a thousand funerals

drumming in my brain —

When a white girl told me I don’t know Sylvia

and I know she knows

nothing of tulips sizzling by my hospital bed

of resurrection of nine lives down to three

Esther’s screams singed with electricity

anesthesia-free, to be

freed from the jar unshattered, unseen

Clawing at my hair, my face, my flat nose bridge

Cry as I let me slip and leave me all to white

White like a cut, white

like a corpse reborn in festering flesh

Losing my virginity

to coffin flies when

Lady Lazarus rips my skin

Hell I try

dying with artistic flair,

and the broken arrow, returns

and drives itself into me.

I remember a white girl told me I don’t know poetry.

I remember a white girl told me I don’t know life.

She told it like she knows my life.

But I remember they are also mine.

Xujia Guan is an international student from China currently studying in Canada. Her work has been published in Red Pocket Magazine, The World In Us, and forthcoming in Eunoia Review. Xujia is also an alumni of the Iowa Young Writers Studio 2022. Other than writing, she enjoys being a sports referee and listening to audio books.