Annabel Li

After the House Fire

Behind the picket ashes a body,  
all the swollen curves dethroned  
 
by blackened flowers. Another memory  
we share too well, I pour out  

the mirrors, clothesline my hands  
into translucence until they are nothing  

but skin and bone.  
Pretend the burdens flinch.  

In the grey of the morning, I am no longer a martyr.  
I listen. Pare around the inheritances  

with the butcher’s knife. In the hush,  
my mother faces the pears.  

She is shedding the skins, each copper flicker  
silhouetted with grief.  

Like memory, I scrub at the walls as if  
they could be clean. Like hands,  

soot unraveling from the cracks—laughing, see,  
this is how every tragedy begins.  

Even the kitchen knows the heartbeat of a funeral  
before it’s begun.  

I imagine numbering the days  
by something other than the sameness  

of our palms, our eyes. A world where the sun  
honeycombs our faces without fear and I do not flinch  

when we reach for the same pear because I can pretend  
it is just a coincidence.  

Here in the suburbs the TV mutters  
fake promises. My mother always told me  

to drink hot water to purify my body. She wants  
to dream of legends, of unbloomed flowers,  

so she teaches me to walk in the fault lines,  
wear my mouth as a fist.   

The commercials are on again  
and the man has shiny teeth and a new lawnmower  

and I wonder when it was last that pear  
didn’t coat my throat. Or when daylight didn’t pull 

backwards, burying itself in dimness,
every shadow a wall or the slow ticking of a door.

When the firefighters come  
they will only see shattered glass, orange air,  

smoke zipping the blinds closed.  
They will stand on the porch, say it’s impossible  

to control something this wild, say the alarm clocks ran  
out of time. When all along there was only this:  

only us, only our heads curled together like flowers  
in the shaking light. 

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Annabel Li (she/her) is a university freshman from Vancouver, Canada. An alumnus of the Adroit Journal’s Summer Mentorship program, her work appears in Fractured Lit and Frontier Poetry and was recognized by CRAFT Literary as a winner of the 2023 Flash Prose Prize. She hopes you have a wonderful day.