Zoe Gu’s Poems

I bear cuts and force flight. But for the first time, I mated a nail clipper’s golden blades and thought of the things a mother will ask of daughter, forcing flight with her teeth: You could—No, how could she start without looking at those hands? So she begins by seeing hands my hands, fumbling to tear away at the whites the way wooden chips are teased, out of thickened skin. I know what could strangle you. I know to find beehives and take on pricks and stick in clammy fingers and let the honey ooze and drool and coat all it wants while I slather and surrender and I don’t do it. I begin to ask the important question: are you scared that I’ll trace my jaw with my foot, tear, gnaw and birth them in air. Bitten the portable little wings, you’re always between my protruding extra fake incisor that a mother dismissed and I accepted. You’ll end up next to the extra gum I left curled in a ball on legs of that bedside table where you’ll leave when my mother leaves when I stick my toe in my mouth and swarm back into pipping saliva. Staring at her army, the rest in her mouth waiting till the tongue eases up, the daughter spits the ovum of my hand all cold on kleenex, all cold and completely fine because mother nature’s white is a shade of ivory so you could still see my babies. Leaving them there, it was what mothers did before wings could even be squeezed. Walking away sickened by some idea of perfection, but she, only turning her back on dozens a day. If I drew them all here, I thought, they’ll make a dotted line right next to my ova, my crimes.

down to the fountain just in time to see you climb in & scrape up gold coins & moss green your fingernails falling flat on your bare thighs thighs that no longer clap collapse against each other on wooden floor: you remember pulsing like a butterfly sawed from a tree still cocooned & he looks at you & he says we are just the same, then weeping he joins you, paddles in, sending droplets grabbing your slippery limbs white shirt you are the gold he was searching for stealing you from the chlorinated water that smells of piss & desire anchoring your ankles the way you crawled treaded on all fours till tens & twenties fused & lifted your knees now mutated with the lapping notes finally you stand upright with shins churned out fleshing bones, you blow dissolved paper money tarnished bubbles for him.

Longtail boat capsized off Koh Phangan beach on December 29, 2024, leaving one missing along with thirteen left overboard.

They were mourning those lost at sea. The shirts that clang to their skin, front and all, without the dryness the collars, straps and buckles enlaced like thread and eye, (Yes, the eye of needles that once pinned down your fingers) should have drained. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell wet from dry when I never learned to work a rolling pin across the dough. (Yes, mine was always stuck, wood to dough, water against flour)

***

Ézi²

My mom called me moth when I was younger, you said. (Yes, I have a nickname too; no, it’s not that, that’s my full name) A moth goes through four life cycles, and for breath gives way to air and lungs surrender to breath, though really, this was the second turn your lungs dropped like wilting petals. (Yes, you were so lucky and so close last time— white-out, your mind’s forgetting is a gift) I imagine them different from your pressed flowers. They’ll call what you do, curved over, fabric pinned on lap, bouquet in hand, an “intangible cultural heritage.” But the chains that went round your wrists were very much tangible. (No, those were for your own good, you kept tugging at the tubes to your throat) For at some point, you became what they called a “vegetable person”— an artist, becoming their very subject.

***

12/30/1969

A moth usually dies after it reproduces. You missed it by a day, but met it by his lifetime. (Yes, your son turned fifty-seven— the day he finally held the whole of you in his palms)

***

The missing Korean tourist was found approximately 500 meters from Rin Queen Pier on December 31.

Survivor’s guilt cannot unearth you. You once knew that fourteen is one off from four. (Yes, four is avoided, you avoid death) It is different from thirteen. What if I picked you up, took you to sea— (No, not like the time you sat, chin stitched to neck, quilting over the blue of the Aegean Sea, your mighty cardigan as the blind)

Lazy baby, tiny altruist, I heard my love for the first time, because your chin lay rested on my patchwork pajamas, and because my fingers clawed into the only softness I knew, hard, the way I knew you liked it. That one time, you purred on my patchwork pajamas so loud, paws in air, I was worried you couldn’t breathe. I took a recording, capturing your symptoms— diagnosis: tremors trapped in honeyed air. Lazy baby, tiny saboteur, you longed for freedom. The moment we got the areca palm, you showed me that softness could cut. Stretching up to reach the leaves, you pieced brown with green, emptiness in brown, but then you brought that all on me. All of that nothing, when abandoning your denim lease, lying on your back, you torched grey with black, white in concrete red, sanding the only softness I knew. Lazy baby, tiny desert dweller, it was you who made me cry out all the water you never licked up, from the kitchen sink. Seeing your back turned against the still, I would’ve—will drain a thousand rivers dry, leave fishes gasping on land, just to soften your tongue again. Your bowl, untouched, did your pupils still dilate when I traced its mineral rings with my forehead circle after circle. Can they still? Baby, I felt my dry eyes shoot up to my forehead and thought that must be what receded the water. Lazy baby, you wanted wetness, not stains. Though the rings always grew, since the day you came and I asked if you were real to mother, where’s the spot where lazy baby went to die? And I slipped gladly back, without an answer, into the only softness I knew.

The slight curvature of the seams, inklings of shedding skin— a snake, running along and across the petticoat. Not a painting, yet worthy amidst the other pieces of modern art. Seemingly patterns stitched upon a garment— but a taxidermy of those who robbed us of the Garden, until this became forever. This involves nervous habits: fingers disconnecting halfway through, splitting oiled strands of hair, like surges of the deep— undulations across the scalp. Deep in thought or veiling a drumming heart upon his teasing gaze, she is her own person, so stumped yet so at peace with him, the snake, and this.

I was opened and looked out to two acres of space. See how it absorbs everything except the olive door, a sheet of freshly cut grass. How you looked down and probably said something about my two ballet flats. Storming into the small opening through the door, I thought it was the size of the two inches of open midriff between my top and skirt. I wondered how long until I dab myself in sulfur and enter those shower curtains. Born on this day, the next day, I shall check for yellow crayons, creeping up my feet, our hair.