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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.

Biography

Picture
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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ISSN 2639-426X
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  • Home
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  • Issues
    • Issue 51
    • Issue 50
    • Issue 49
    • Issue 48
    • Issue 47
    • Issue 46
    • Issue 45
    • Issue 44
    • Issue 43
    • Issue 42
    • Issue 41
    • Issue 40
    • Issue 39
    • Issue 38
    • Issue 37
    • Issue 36
    • Issue 35
    • Issue 34
    • Issue 33
    • Issue 32
    • Issue 31
    • Issue 30
    • Issue 29
    • Issue 28
    • Issue 27
    • Issue 26
    • Issue 25
    • Issue 24
    • Issue 23
    • Issue 22
    • Issue 21
    • Issue 20
    • Issue 19
    • Issue 18
    • Serenity
    • Issue 17
    • The Audio Room
    • Issue 16
    • Issue 15
    • Issue 14
    • Play It Again
    • Issue 13
    • Issue 12
    • Issue 11
    • Issue 10
    • Issue 9
    • Issue 8
    • Issue 7
    • Issue 6
    • Hand to Mouth
    • Issue 5
    • Issue 4
    • Issue 3
    • Issue 2
    • Issue 1
  • Submissions