In the morning, I make dreams I can’t remember

The day is a closed loop; dark moon touching the light. I float paper boats in water and write a poem for every second they stay in sight. I hold on. The stuff that makes me solid drifts. Why try to be meaningful when your aunt can’t read it anyway. No one can read it anyway, because it only happens in your head. It isn’t happening when it happens but after, when you’ve decided that it’s happened. The impossible instant before a sound is made; the flash of lightning, then the crack. You feel it when you dive from a cliff and break the water like a seal. Everyone knows there are other ways to die, like being devoured by wild animals. They don’t think about stupid things, like how much time has passed since you forgot the name of your mother’s birthplace. In the water, it’s unclear what you can name first: the cold, the depth, the dark. What you become aware of, for something to turn real. Why try? Why not just lie down and feel the weight of your body pressing into the bed beneath you? (Language is imprecise but it’s all we have.) My hands surprise me like a wolf. They have a weight. I want to be so heavy that I disappear into light.

I wept when I read an Untitled poem by Franz Wright

I don't want to grow into

a strange elderly child.

The rain-light makes my scar

look sharp and cool against the skin

my grandmother gave me.

I miss those days of cloudless

sunlight, when my father and I

would ride our bikes to Dairy Queen

then the park where I first learned

he could make mistakes too.

A park ranger pulled up to us

in the sudden downpour.

I wasn't wearing a helmet.

He made us put our bikes in the bed

of his pickup, then tucked our heads

beneath a roof.

All I wanted, though,

was to be out in the rain with Dad.

His dark hair plastered to his forehead

made him look the way he must've the night

he was robbed at knifepoint on the streets of Houston

when he came to this country and realized

it wasn't going to be so easy.

They say you can never go home again

and Dad said, they were right.

--

Note:

Phrases in the first stanza—“strange elderly child” and “rain-light”—are borrowed from the Untitled poem by Franz Wright that begins “Will I always be eleven.”

Catherine Bai has received fellowships and support from Vermont Studio Center, the Periplus Collective, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, West Branch, Pleiades, and Best Debut Short Stories 2022. Her poetry appears in Luna Luna Magazine and the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. She is a first-year MFA student at the University of Florida.