Evy Shen
Flight Instinct
The watermelon guy is back with the tongue
of my clock. Underneath my window, he forces
his deformed fruits into ears of
pedestrians with the glibness of a broken country.
The supermarket blares a pastel, a pale shade of nostalgia or
maybe it’s poison but mothers form mirror-long lines
to cash their disquietude, to see their faces not as a relic
but as a foreigner. Leaden fog drapes across the city
a silken layer of film settled atop chilled congee over
this machine. I swallow the sun: salted duck egg yolk
heathered in the creek, breaths of playground
dreams slick against my neck. I submerse myself
and see the children’s feet kicking as pickled plums.
Next morning, I will kneel over the algae on
the bridge across my flat, pressed against the
shrunken asphalt, stretching to heaven. Or maybe to
the basketball court and its lantanas on the sidewalk.
The blistering cafeteria. I can profess to my fingers spilling
across the atlas, my heart shuttering at every stop.
But it’s all the same. My uncle will drive his black hearse,
smoking cigarettes and honking his horn at old ladies. I ride
bus 353, show up to my grandmother’s and play poker
on a square table matted with sweat, devour her
as metal and paper. Always stuck in this bubble, waiting
to undress the outskirts, always hungry. I want to
taste the cropped electricity and trace the cranes beyond
the window. I want erasure of the knee-deep morass of home--
everything uprooted and divested of their rest.
of my clock. Underneath my window, he forces
his deformed fruits into ears of
pedestrians with the glibness of a broken country.
The supermarket blares a pastel, a pale shade of nostalgia or
maybe it’s poison but mothers form mirror-long lines
to cash their disquietude, to see their faces not as a relic
but as a foreigner. Leaden fog drapes across the city
a silken layer of film settled atop chilled congee over
this machine. I swallow the sun: salted duck egg yolk
heathered in the creek, breaths of playground
dreams slick against my neck. I submerse myself
and see the children’s feet kicking as pickled plums.
Next morning, I will kneel over the algae on
the bridge across my flat, pressed against the
shrunken asphalt, stretching to heaven. Or maybe to
the basketball court and its lantanas on the sidewalk.
The blistering cafeteria. I can profess to my fingers spilling
across the atlas, my heart shuttering at every stop.
But it’s all the same. My uncle will drive his black hearse,
smoking cigarettes and honking his horn at old ladies. I ride
bus 353, show up to my grandmother’s and play poker
on a square table matted with sweat, devour her
as metal and paper. Always stuck in this bubble, waiting
to undress the outskirts, always hungry. I want to
taste the cropped electricity and trace the cranes beyond
the window. I want erasure of the knee-deep morass of home--
everything uprooted and divested of their rest.
Biography
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Evy Shen (she/her) is a high school junior from Georgia. Her writing has been published in or is forthcoming in Penn Review, Kissing Dynamite, Blue Marble Review, and elsewhere. Her favorite places to travel to are Suzhou, China and SoHo, New York. When she is not writing, she is outside with her family enjoying God's beautiful nature. Find her on Twitter @helloevy2
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