i don’t know where paradise comes from, but i know i am at least the gate of bone keeping my body from it. my soul electrical, stalks of grief bowing before the morning sun. i count my ribs and then my faults like i count the miles from here to eden, not with my hands but on the strands of black hair tethered to the base of my skull that stretch into the infinite, where people don’t know the…

college collects dust as patiently as a landmine on the other side of the new year you know that you know everything— you’ve seen this movie before, you’ve read the book, you hummed this song last night while rows of snow buried the shape of the concrete sidewalk outside by the road leading into the distance of another life. you want everything. the sound of a book page turning, a bathtub filling…

the first time you touch me, we are seventeen. the river is drunk beside us, milky filth churning chocolate, and you hold my hands and dip your chubby index finger through the cut on my lip i got from your bike, collision of bodies. you bend, serpentine— perhaps to match the river’s long wind. i remember you like this: in stages and all at once—in a moment, you are my whole childhood and then you…

            after jericho brown let me begin again with hope.    let the soft animal in these parts carry a well-formed organ. let the animal have a heart, please.    yesterday i saw a doe among the snow, dead by the roadside. dead by the roadside, i saw the crows take a doe.    in the snow, i could see only one set of tracks. i could only see one set of tracks in the snow       that walked into…

Robin Wang’s work has previously been published in Vagabond City and SOFTBLOW. She fences and lives in Canada.

i’m still right here. i’m still right here and so is my hair, just the way i want it. it falls, willowy, plain, at my feet. i could dream again, i dream about living. i could write again, i write about water, sharp and blue. what was i— alight, pale, smooth, peeled, hair at my feet, these inedible fingers— i am making a womb. i am letting my bones go light. i was so sure of my edges, my eager…

Robin Wang’s work has previously been published in Vagabond City and SOFTBLOW. She fences and lives in Canada.

i want to put a nice poem between my ribs instead of this beating heart   i want a painting of a face instead of a face a song lyric in a language i don’t understand instead of these empty words in the voice i don’t love i tie it all together with shoelaces i forget to double knot who will forgive me when i don’t who will put their palm over my mouth hold it there and then like a poem let me…