Turning to Wallpaper by Heidi Wong

Author:Heidi Wong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

OUR STORY, TOLD IN THE WRONG ORDER

11. i kiss the stump of my ring finger

to clean our what ifs out of my skin.

2. christmas lights flutter alive in shinjuku,

my phone screen follows its glow. this black frame,

a glass wall where i cannot touch you, only watch

as our breath turns to raindrops on the surface.

i open my notes app and begin writing.

the source of this feeling, a sea of marigolds.

connection owes a certain reliance to history.

eight years later, this poem still only has one line:

december was the warmest month.

6. summers in new york smell like apricots and rain.

i pull out the right love from the back of my throat,

a ballerina spinning in my music box mouth,

and misplace it.

spend the next six months piecing together

the shards of her porcelain.

9. i delete and re-add your number every day for three weeks.

8. i write twelve verses to no one.

by noon they all sound the same:

you only wanted me as a ghost.

7. six months later, i send: happy birthday. hope you’re doing good.

and we return in a perfect hallucination, a reminder of bodies.

we pour into each other as if we were made of water,

yet continue to cover up each excuse

like dressing an open wound.

4. your returning comes, always, in a mosaic of pixels.

i drive upstate from a budding manhattan,

thinking what magic that this darkened expanse

lights up to halos

to bring you back to me.

12. i brush by the same cities we promised each other,

peer into each cavern of sunset until i find the right shade of future.

someone said there’s an angel hidden in the gardens,

mama says there’s always blood in the riverbanks.

one day i will read my poems in seattle and not think of you.

one day i will find proof that anything disguising itself

as endurance is not love.

3. we do not talk for one year.

5. we do not talk for two years.

1. legs crossed, hair pulled into a high ponytail.

i brush a layer of black paint over my bike

and tuck my phone between two ninth grade textbooks.

we’ve been talking for about a week now.

you make me smile. i tell no one.

10. i cut my ring finger off with mama’s kitchen knife

and purge the words i’ve swallowed for eight years.

“For stony limits cannot hold love out,

And what love can do, that dares love attempt”

a pilgrimage never begun, a body heavy with oceans,

a slow fall that never leaves the ground.

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