Evacuation

Penny Wei, United States

Mama, don’t leave the faucet running. Don’t you see?

We are drowning in our own pulse, dissolving as rice into something spineless. She only

watches with a palm of loose tooth she plucked from

her daughter’s mouth: said, if you swallow the wound, you’ll never lose it; said, hush, hush.

A sky ripens, purple & full-bellied. She presses wrists

into grains of floor & lets cement drink her dry, each breath tithing to the doorway. Mama, why

fold us as shadows into origami bones, steam curling

a ghost smoke’s wither? Why eat facing the window, sun crawling lunette in bloated hands?

Vowels gut & soften as long-left pomelo. We are but

unspooling hair coiled around chair legs— her way of collecting: drowned & glistening at edges.

The mirror has gone blind. Faces stripped-ribs pressed

into silver as glass-pinned moth wings. It does not blink nor shiver. Mama, stop drifting to where

light does not settle, ankles blue & skin-spitted. Do not

kneel below the furniture & calcify your body in the belly of a dream. Do not let the orchid

hum itself rotten—salt-gloved fingertips, marrow thinned

to mist. Tonight, the house thaws into a blessing. Stove chiming open-mouthed, a blue-ringed

animal in an air-swallowing ambush. Mama, we are thinning.

You and me. Us. Bone-white & silent. I trace heat to your wrists, exhaled & lantern-eyed.

Promise me, remember the sound of water before you tuck

yourself into mason jars, before I peel into jawbones, rusting in a mid-century drain. Will you?

Penny Wei is from Shanghai and Massachusetts. She has been recognized by The Word Works, amongst others.