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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.

Biography

Picture
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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