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