Ziyi Yan

where you refuse to settle within reasonable confidence

on anything. it’s like this constant pull where you refuse

to ever align yourself anywhere– talk about feeling

i kissed him to prove him wrong. anyway,
i’ve been studying the migration of sunlight by collecting

all the sweat i’ve ever sweat in a bucket. to know you,
i’ve been eating flowers and bisecting whole trophic levels.

having it all is like killing my teenage grandparents. i hide
in a farm before the job; it reminds me of summer camp.

she’s using that bug spray like perfume.

 really,
i was coaxing gnats to stand on my elbow. i hold myself near orphaned

i don’t love you, please keep licking me

. months
ago, they raced into a storm to prove they could swallow all

this world’s relentless water. now, their mother won’t look
at them and i am covered in goat shit, screaming 

the deeper you go, the weirder it gets. a couple prays
over goat stew at our table. boys trudge through birthdays,

trying to figure out when their parents last fucked. i lie
between strangers like a pin nestled in a puzzle; when my friend

feels lonely, i steal flowers from a grave i trampled days back.
last night, we tossed puzzle pieces across a table for hours

before realizing my parents had never been born. in another world,
i am still leaving my hair anywhere– loving anyone.

I’ve left dinner to stare myself down in the bathroom.
I need to be touched and I don’t know what to say next.

My first day home, I don’t finish what I started. Instead, I force
mud into my bath sponge, align my empty space

to walk through lovers. More and more, I am leaving the scene
to study pinpricks and clotted bug spray: everywhere I go,

kids gape at me, not sure why I’m still waiting to be claimed. I know
too well that there is nothing hostile in the way they scatter;

how, in their world, the land is just the land.

Poetry