ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Dai “Debby” Shi is a current high school junior who attends Walnut Hill School for the Arts. She is ethnically Chinese, but was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. Her work has been featured in Eunoia Review, Panel Magazine, the Interlochen Review, as well as being a finalist in the Smith College Poetry Contest. Other than writing poetry, she also dabbles in screenwriting and enjoys watching movies.
It’s Too Early
I was born between clefts of glacier ice and numbers
on checks, scrawled in Chinese penmanship — between cucumber
slices, laid flat on white bread or against bloodshot eyes, aflame
with tiny dragons. The skin under the eye is the most delicate, better
when firm, shows your age when loose. Eye cream with a thousand
ingredients for firm under eyes that glow at night, delicate sarcoma
or milky cataracts in my grandma’s eyes. Green tea with a splash of milk.
If I pull hard enough at thin strings of beauty, her ghost floats through
my lap, a cold breeze in humid Shanghai air. The premature spring
wind will slip through my hair, the trees pink with cherry blossoms,
bouncy locks will fly into the sky, hang off walls, release the aroma of
roses and fertility. They’ll land the way they do in the salon, a cat
from a windowsill. Preferably it’ll happen in public. Validation
at the shaking of dice. Then I’ll see him. He’ll be abnormally tall,
as huggable as an ironing board. He’ll be impressed by my tight
under eyes. He’ll ask. I’ll be the cool girl. Of course I avoided
the overwhelming allure of under eye injections. My grandma
had the best genetics. Cyborg like me. I’ll kneel
before him when he asks, knees on hard ground while he reclines
on the bed that I fluffed. He’ll push my head down, hand in my hair,
it’ll hurt — but he must think that it’s soft. When I go home, my mom
will remark how pretty and flushed I look. I’ll smile in the effortless
cool, dismissive way that I do. Today, I don’t imagine I will be able to
look her in the eye. She paid so much for my wisdom
and look at all of this, this is everything I have to show for it.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
