Jenny Shi | Yellow River | Poets Resist | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Jenny Shi is an incoming freshman at Stanford University. She is a poet and visual artist whose knowledge of the sciences seeps into her brushes. Her art and writing is published in The Adroit Journal, Body Without Organs, and Rising Phoenix Review.

Jenny Shi’s Website.

Also by Jenny Shi: In these blue-white glades Father Two Paintings

Poets Resist
Edited by Elizabeth Ruth Deyro
July 23, 2020

Jenny Shi

Yellow River

In this river, I only know I’m forgetting all the sunken places on my body where flesh disappears as sweat whispers itself into water, where body slides off the bone like a slip dress, and my tendons are taut from pulling weeds and boats of promises stacked high as a chapel, where we could wring our shirts from their shadows and escape this river, sipping on our drowning, its slow breath tracing the shore. I’m not afraid to sink — I’m waiting for the land to bleed into the water, for something gifted by ghosts lodged between dry sand — maybe a city of bones, brittle and cracking like their smiles. I could swallow this river with my hunger, mouth limned in my eyes, jaws stuck in a mound of calcified dreams. In this river, we sleep with our eyelids open & watch the useless sky darken as fast as browning buffets at a marriage, the waiters’ hands sour with trash, clutching their hunger like it’s something precious, and maybe it is — among all the dirt and stupidity, their hunger is pure like the moon, existing with no temper, no desire to overtake like a shadow, or to dazzle a chandelier of atoms releasing slow syllables of death, stealthy as carbon monoxide, like what's hanging at the edge of this river. I see the ghosts there, with their mouths open like moons, drinking our flesh. Their silence, like the river, is the color of jaundice, and never ends. This river is home to all that we’ve lost, and here we are in it still trying to grow smaller. We track the time by our molting, the peeling of our puckered skin or sinew, whatever is left.