Gray Spaces

Last night, I dreamed you died. I went up
to the cafeteria lobby and framed a
television screen: a sober fuzzy image
of your empty plum plush chair.
A faceless worker dutifully scooped
chives and tears onto your plate.
Your teeth, dandelions.
At my old school—
the one before you existed—
I watched your ghost untouch.
There was no funeral, only
seams of generated friends.
Fishing line stitched their
cheeks: smelting drapes,
vanishing at the cleft.

I don’t think it would’ve gone
this way if I had stopped my pace
nine months earlier, extended
a feathery platitude. Would
I be outside right now, choking
on crabgrass and loam?
Would my peeling walls—
the ones saccharine with palm
fronds and Photoshopped frogs—
dry of sorrow?

When I come back from
Montreal, Lodi, Ningbo,
I always tell myself it never passed.
Foie gras, intrusive calligraphy:
signals wrangled from wrinkly flesh.
The frothy egg my father beats:
an aerated palette, a shimmering edge.
This is why I shake Descartes’ hand,
why when I wake summer, I text you.
My sclera clouds by the hour, holding its breath.

Ava Chen is an emerging poet based in Massachusetts. She enjoys exploring themes of memory, dreams, and the mundane through abstract and experimental language. Her work is forthcoming in The Daphne Review.