Katie B. Tian
Why I Won't Ask You to Dinner Anymore
An Acrostic for Loss
Because I’m afraid
I’ll ask you to run away
with me, but I can’t ask
you to undirty the ink I’ve spilled
or ask you to meet me at the downtown diner
after graduation where we
were strangers in passing, before we watched
the sky hatch & egg yolks spill
like sunlight down a scrap-tired
dead end street where neighbors floated, drunk
on alternate nights, where we wove
a tapestry of our untidied ambitions,
two unkempt mouths humming a prayer
before colliding, bone-bruised,
in the backseat—for three
months straight, I cleared the engine
of mildew so we could escape this godless
town where every pretty picture was extinguished years
ago by the butt of a cigarette & every person was
reinvented as an elegy & no one would come
looking for us anyway—
and I want to be unabashed: fearless, certain
in my uncertainty, but my crescent
nailbeds are laced with yesterday’s dirt & I don’t know
why I can’t stop my hands from shaking
earthquakes under arizona’s swollen sky & I
didn’t confess in time—I don’t think—to stop
the tide from turning & the cold shakes
from setting in because now I have plastic
buttons for eyes, only seeing ugly & uglier but
I can still trace every harbored possibility
down the memory of your sequined spine; I can still
pick apart each sugared syllable, candy floss
I might swallow more easily once
I’ve wrung the joke dry, collected
the leftover curd: let me make it
up to you, let me run away
with you, let me grow old
with you or ask you to junior prom because I didn’t
the first time & now
you’re caught in the gaping mouths
of promises I gathered & strung along the predawn
phone lines that tether an island
my rain-slick hands may never reach.
Because I’m afraid
I’ll ask you to run away
with me, but I can’t ask
you to undirty the ink I’ve spilled
or ask you to meet me at the downtown diner
after graduation where we
were strangers in passing, before we watched
the sky hatch & egg yolks spill
like sunlight down a scrap-tired
dead end street where neighbors floated, drunk
on alternate nights, where we wove
a tapestry of our untidied ambitions,
two unkempt mouths humming a prayer
before colliding, bone-bruised,
in the backseat—for three
months straight, I cleared the engine
of mildew so we could escape this godless
town where every pretty picture was extinguished years
ago by the butt of a cigarette & every person was
reinvented as an elegy & no one would come
looking for us anyway—
and I want to be unabashed: fearless, certain
in my uncertainty, but my crescent
nailbeds are laced with yesterday’s dirt & I don’t know
why I can’t stop my hands from shaking
earthquakes under arizona’s swollen sky & I
didn’t confess in time—I don’t think—to stop
the tide from turning & the cold shakes
from setting in because now I have plastic
buttons for eyes, only seeing ugly & uglier but
I can still trace every harbored possibility
down the memory of your sequined spine; I can still
pick apart each sugared syllable, candy floss
I might swallow more easily once
I’ve wrung the joke dry, collected
the leftover curd: let me make it
up to you, let me run away
with you, let me grow old
with you or ask you to junior prom because I didn’t
the first time & now
you’re caught in the gaping mouths
of promises I gathered & strung along the predawn
phone lines that tether an island
my rain-slick hands may never reach.
Biography
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Katie B. Tian (she/her) is a sixteen-year-old Chinese-American writer and journalist from New York. A Scholastic Art & Writing National Medalist and two-time Adelphi Quill Awards First Place winner, her work is published or forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Rising Phoenix Review, Blue Marble Review, and Eunoia Review, among others. In her spare time, she serves as the Creative Writing Director of online literary magazine The Incandescent Review. Apart from writing, she has various talents, such as singing in the shower and eating her weight in brown sugar boba bars.
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