Helen Gu

Rain

The sickness is on the plate
again, sunny-side up. Carrion
smeared across the tips
of our noses and wanting smelled
like death. We unravelled
like persimmons; our flesh too
astringent to the taste so
we swallowed our fingers
whole. The widows of our hairlines
become a tide plucked dry. The bridge
crumbled while we were standing
still. Blood as black honey
on your tongue so I drank
the gash like it was a mother’s
breast, soft between my teeth.
I laughed like I wanted
to be alive. We were two spools
of thread unraveling. I was
wasteland of a hundred bodies
or so. I loved the knife
before I loved you: coal-lit fistful
of a girl, rusted, shaved clean. I would gut
myself on the cutting board
by my lover’s feet because the blade
kissing the flesh was a poem
rivered down my veins. Before
our skeletons stiffen into deliverance,
I am mostly water. Really,
I didn’t want to die. We still stood
outside by the broken bridge. The wind
kissed our temples like a bullet
too tired to kill.

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Helen Gu is a writer based in San Jose, California. An alum of the Iowa Young Writers Studio, her work appears or is forthcoming in Eucalyptus Lit, Eunoia Review, Scapegoat Review, Inflectionist Review, Neologism and others.