Serrina Zou

On my eighteenth birthday I cry myself a river

to wash the shores of childhood clean: when morning dies 
I bathe my body in the light leftover from its skeletal bone. 

When mourning, I remember there are 171,476 words alive 
in the English language & none of them are pretty enough 

to disguise this final act of departure. I want to recolor my daydreams 
& impregnate them whole again. Too late. I'm told this year: be careful 

what you wish for before I blow out my candles. 
But instead, I let them burn until wax blisters 

against white frosting & I think this could be enough 
of a poem to drown in. Outside the cherry blossoms furl 

into themselves, preparing for the wind. Its howling: ready, 
set, go. Enough of a miracle to turn water into wine, 

tears into truth. What I haven’t shown you yet: my memory 
fleshed into metaphor the way a body breaks when it is blessed. 

Or how I was offered a glass of wine last week when I was still seventeen 
& soft-skinned. The man who offered it to me said he was seventy-four, 

but lived only seven & a half weeks. Plucking the fortune creases 
that lined his palms, he whispered it’s time. To live this unending lie, 

mortality was only a metaphor for the dead—how youth is limited 
like cherry blossoms—fading between the winds that carry them 

to their dirges. In this love letter to all that I have lost, 
I let the river’s current tear me into next year.


Serrina Zou is a Chinese-American writer from San Jose, California. She has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program, the Poetry Society of the UK, and Frontier Poetry, among others. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, AAWW: The Margins, Diode Poetry Journal, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. When she is not writing, Serrina can be found feeding her Philz Coffee addiction or devouring a tower of novels. She will attend Columbia University in the fall of 2021