#rona wang

A rush of street veins, the trains spitting up soggy girls,

stale microwaved coffee ebbing away at

your tongue as the guitar twangs of an indie rock band

fills afternoon silence with salt,

something that loses its taste after a moment or two.

You’ve been scribbling down cluttered

thoughts into notebooks fragile and

ridged like leaves drowned

in muddy storm puddles.

November means bruised clouds always on the edge

of breaking, sleet peppered with

regret and slivers of the moon.

One day when you’re not thirteen anymore,

you know you’re getting out of this city.

your ghosts are not your own (may 2013)

It starts when, in the shudder of spring warmth,

ghosts shatter in skyscraper shadows.

You spend afternoons drifting in the streets,

trying to find the missing seams of your bones.

Instead, you:

stumble upon a philosophy major who asks for the purpose

of the blurred horizon, which you do not know the answer to;

meet a coffee barista who is saving up for a rose-gold city south of here,

somewhere beyond the trills of sunrise, beyond hearts stolen and crushed;

listen to the stories of the girl standing with a cardboard sign at the gleaming traffic light,

green blinking into yellow blinking into red over and over and over.

It’s been creeping upon you for weeks, this recognition

that you are fourteen, one kid standing in one place,

there is an infinite expanse of worlds beyond,

and your ghosts are scorns of an ubiquitous past.

ii. 

You brushed off the definitions meant to unstring prettiness,

while surreptitious requiem plethora dripped from your collarbone as diamonds,

wove around your wrists as gold and emerald,

adorned your fingers as sapphires.

iii. 

In August we sat on a roof, looked for shooting stars.  

You wished upon a satellite instead, and

we did not kiss at midnight. 

iv.

On my seventeenth birthday you brought bleeding chocolates, a rose of two weeks ago, 

told me I love you

three more words to add to your sparkling collection, suffused with

naught.

~~~~