This was inelegance: the way her hands twitched, her legs, her fingers. The way she sat stiff and cross-legged, the way she kept her hands hopeless and heretical, wrung together with wire and wisteria. Her thumbs kept brushing against her nails as though they were measuring for any miniscule matter that missed conformity. She swallowed, her index finger sweeping over the tip of her thumb, her other index finger born together with the soft cheek of her face: she was trying, truly, to tolerate and to be tender. Her teeth dug into her bottom lip with the faint fervor of some martyr already dying and shifted left, right, left, right. She gave her hands away from herself, locked them back together in their homes, and left them in her lap. Again, her fingers twitched, her eyes, her gaze, her attention. The nothings she noticed gathered in splotches strewn about her skin, and her thumbs brushed over her nails again.
          In that tight-limbed digestion, her fingers had intimacy, had lust, had sex, their roots reaching for each other, touching, tasting, learning. She felt no pleasure in their closeness and neither did they, and they wanted distance, wanted partings, wanted goodbyes said with blood and broiled hearts; she wanted something, she wanted smooth skin. Her fingers were given what they wanted: hands tearing apart, hands pressing against cool glass, hands struggling between impulse and rationale, and tempted by instinct, by intrinsic and innate idiosyncrasies of the brain to do as they craved. She craved better; she craved resilience, but there was none to spare. It was like fire not to listen and like gunfire to listen.
          She pulled her legs closer to herself, still cross-legged with her hands long lifted from the glass. This was pulling a trigger to a part of you: this was promising yourself that the gun wasn’t loaded. She was never meant to swallow restraint, and so her hands found their homes and gathered all the places on her legs, all the graves of gathered splotches that should’ve been but couldn’t be loved.

          Her thumbs brushed her nails and measured again, bringing the ghost of pain, taunting nerves with touch that was not gentle enough. She pressed a hand to her face, a sweep or a sliver of swallowed resistance; fingertips moaned a love song, birthing each gradual cell of her lips, her nose, her cheeks. This was a cemetery, but even snakes knew this was too holy, for now; knowingly she took it home to the other hand, the index and thumb digging deeply and deeper: an indent into her calf, a brush of her index upon the rotting-bodies skin pressed in a nail on a not-worshipped grave and called itself a thief, a desecrator, a ruiner.

          And there was a red gold beneath it and all of them, but her fervored fingers were not the gore-greedy gods that most imagined them to be. Neither was she, this irresilient, irresisting mimic of Eve choking desperately at the figure of snakes. She dug deeply: deeper, deeper, deeper. She was given what she looked for and never wanted, and she watched, withering and wounded for an elongated second. Her lips spelled out a frown and pleaded her fingers to move on.

If my name was William and I wrote a play about revenge,
I would have written less about Hamlet and more about Ophelia.
I imagine Ophelia to be the kind of college student who stays
in her dorm on Friday nights. On Friday nights are parties
where homework exists only as hallucinations, half-forgotten
by young bodies that wash themselves together with things
they were taught to say no to. They analyze my play,
not with techniques and thoughts but with their tongues—
downing lines like liquor: the sharp burn explained
as foreshadowing or a missed metaphor, something
about premature regret or the cruelty of enjoyment.
Romeo and Juliet at the party turn their backs on their parents
and skinny-dip in the community pool as the only unit
among uncrucified stars. Hamlet, forced to go by his uncle
who yelled at him to cheer up, says no to everything,
wearing black and trying to call his ex-girlfriend. Ophelia,
who went to class in the morning even though her father died,
is too busy hallucinating on homework to even write
down her own name. I try to tell her that right now, she is nothing
but a device to flesh out a man who doesn’t actually love her,
but she’s only half-listening. By the time Hamlet sticks his feet
into the pool and stops sneering at the lovers, Ophelia notices 
those five missed calls. Friday nights are for showers,
but Ophelia goes to take a bath. The manuscript of my play
follows her footsteps, collecting behind her like the small death
of a star. She skinny-dips in the tub, sinks deep, and never turns
off the faucet, if only to keep the glassy look in her eyes.
Her naked legs stare at her and she stares back, reading all of Hamlet’s
I loved you nots¹ that criss-cross down both her thighs and rise
from the rest of her. I think she would keep a bottle of antiseptic
next to the soap for nights when she wrote him down. She opens
this bottle slowly, still staring at her legs and where they melted
into a star-crossed secret. Thinking about how he said no to her
but called her five times, Ophelia lifts the bottle’s lip to her lips,
makes out with it, drinks rubbing alcohol on a Friday night.

Footnotes
1. The phrase "I loved you not" is found in William Shakespeare's Hamlet in Act 3 Scene 1 Line 118.

Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Jeff Dolven. New York: Barnes & Noble., 2006. Print.

W. CERBERUS
There is a dog that guards the gates of the Underworld.
Sometimes, when things are slow, it tries to bite its own tail
in order to pass the time. It is a very difficult process because
the dog has three heads and only one item of interest. Often,
the heads fight between themselves so intently that they forget
to guard the gate or to remember why they fought at all. There
is rarely, if ever, a clear victor, because they are all the same dog.
But when there is one, it does not bite its own tail. This is because
their six ears finally hear the thin tick-tock of the gate, still swaying
long after use.

E. NÜ-WA
There was once a woman who made all of humanity.
She had a face in the shape of a melon seed and was
therefore very beautiful. Her eyes, rich with darkness,
were the same color as the fertile earth, which is the
womb of life. Her lips were as pink as a newborn’s skin,
and they were the only part of her that any of us ever
learned. When she cried, her tears quenched our parched
throats and were saltless. When she smiled, the red sun
slicked across the horizon and kept our nights tender.
When she turned her back on us and disappeared,
her long, black hair swept the ground that she made us
from and drew large, long streaks that taught us how
to bury our dead.

Translator's¹ note: The blank brackets indicate a word or words I couldn't translate, not because I don't know what they mean, but because I can't find something full enough, something swollen enough to convey their nuances. Brackets that include words and question marks indicate my best attempt to decipher the contextual meanings and connotations of the original phrase in the language.

*

Dear Bullet

1.

Heaven, then virgin, possessed
[            ] and a hero’s ashes who once wailed
Now please [kill? kiss?] me.

2.

He was once a maker’s
archer: his spine: his bow,
and his [life? lips?]: his arrows.
He was once in love and made love:
he was afraid not to be
too [       ] or wenrou.² 

3.

He loved so simply and strongly that he
would destroy [everything? nothing?] and
himself for her.

4.

On the days before his death, he said
The moon must miss me as I miss her. 
Above the [       ] there was a mourning lady who 
[lost? gave?] everything to [worship?] her godhood.

5.

Beloved, once cried the archer
to her altar,
curse, O, heart titled [           ]!
She, weeping often, knew: too much
he did that which was evil.

6.

And his arrows were nothing
like bullets, crying dear
to someone who used to [never?]
wane and wax or hide.


1. The "translator" of this poem is the narrative character of "I".
2. wenrou means tender or gentle in Chinese.

In this evening of Mondays,                 my father and I speak
in father-and-daughter language.                    We stir our feet
above cement ground,                        our bodies quite similar
in shape.                  The park is filled with more than just us,
but it looks empty                 of people from a close distance.
That is the distance we choose to look from.                I walk
on the curb, try to learn a balancing act.          In a short time,
my feet slip,                            and I grip my father’s shoulder
like one would wring a neck.             I think of throwing him
my mistakes; instead, I do not try again.       I let go and sink
my feet into the grass.                  With his shoulder now free,
my father disappears,                flies forward a distance so far
that he no longer looks like my father.                             This,
his intermittent boyhood.    I know nothing about the sanctity
of this optical illusion.   I shout for him, but I do not call him
Father, do not speak our shared speech.                Slow down!
And nothing. Wait for me! And nothing.   I run, but he is still
the same far distance.       Soon, the night fits its slender neck
down my throat,      all the way into my lungs,     and my feet
crumple into roots,           my body bent like a trampled blade
of grass. I try to cough it out, and I find my father at the same
close distance we watched the park from.     I call out to him:
Dad!    He has changed the shape of his body: body of wings,
of birds— another optical illusion.             He has noticed me,
as I have noticed him.          Slowly, I realize that he is not my 
father, not illusion: crane-body with beak, with wife and child
lingering behind him. I remember learning that cranes can kill
dogs, can kill things dear to other things.     In the far distance,
my father hears our language,          slows down to come back,
and I stare at the cranes and think of how easy          it must be
to wring                                                               a slender neck.

here is where icarus fell with his waxen wings disappearing,
experiencing hopelessness in mouthfuls, choking on
unswallowed pride. and this is where mother earth held his
funeral, beneath the sweeping movements of the ocean; where
she finally embraced him and lulled him to sleep. i stand nearby with flowers in my hands, wanting to put them
by his grave, but his death was unmarked and ignored. there is
no tombstone here to which i could dedicate these blossoms. but why am i compelled to do this? why do we put him on a
pedestal? like haunting, hunting vultures we spiral around
tragedies like his with hungry eyes and hungry hearts. maybe
it isn’t because of the sympathy that we are expressing but of
the sympathy that we are seeking. maybe, instead of noticing how his ambition tore out his lungs
and taking that as a warning sign, we noticed how that same
ambition caressed his face with bliss and we thought: what
would it take for me to make that last? these flowers are a mockery, then. this sentiment i hold for a
boy that flew too high must be a stupid extension of self-pity,
so when i fail, i can tell myself, hey, at least you didn’t suck so
badly to become a greek tragedy. why are we so threatened by and terrified of failure that it
cautions us against ambition? why are we forced to temper the
voracious thirst for anything and everything that our instincts
have made for us? why do high school students kill themselves
from stress when we are told that we are children,
that childhood is the best time of our lives? is icarus an analogy? is he every teenage boy and girl who
opted to fall because he or she or they couldn’t fly? how
different is falling anyway? and is the sun an analogy, too? unattainable standards?
definitions of beauty and intelligence measured solely by
numbers, and if you don’t have an A+ in one, you better have
it in the other if you want to live? daedalus, too, is he an analogy to our parents? the ones who
equip us with what was and is enough for them, but not
enough for us? why isn’t it enough for us? is it because we are taught to need more in order to live less? so, if i give icarus flowers, am i acknowledging that his death
was deserved? if i don’t give him flowers, am i acknowledging
that his death was deserved? is this how shrödinger felt when he was about to open the box?
icarus’ flowers, the newest paradox. sounds like it could sell. am i overanalyzing? i think i might be. i bought the flowers at walmart when they weren’t on sale,
picked the biggest bouquet there of white ones, because they
looked the prettiest, as though someone had taken them
straight out of a poem. in my hands, now, though, they look
kind of ugly; like ghost-pale skin, showing nothing but
vacancy, winter-paper and cold, stilted. i feel like a liar. i like to go on philosophical tangents, but really, these flowers
are hideous, and i spent twenty dollars on them. so, i also feel
kind of cheated. i can’t return them, though, because i didn’t save my receipt; i
don’t think icarus was the kind of person to save receipts either.
maybe his father was, though. if his father was alive today,
he’d collect receipts instead of feathers and duct tape
paper-mache wings for his son to fly out of high school lockers. each line in the receipts would have been for books and
binders and pens and pencils and band aids and journals and
maybe one day, hospital fees. or maybe not, but if hospital
fees are on there, then flowers will be on there, too. hopefully, daedalus won’t buy white flowers from walmart. i throw my bouquet with its fancy wrapping into the water; it
floats, somehow, the flower petals swirling and bobbing in the
water, drawn to an innate belief of surviving, of exposing
themselves even at destruction. maybe i’ll be charged with littering. and yet, the light of the sun that killed ambition bounces off
the shiny plastic, spelling out an epitaph. here lies icarus: burdened, burned, buried. of course, it doesn’t take the blame.

*Recipient of 2016 Regional Gold Key, under the same title.

in a land of death and desperation, i hold a
mouthful of words. they catch on my tongue,
the caked dirt, the piled dust, crumbling at the touch of air
drawn in by opened lips. they stick to my teeth: an echo.
i love you, i love you more than anything.

except— amidst the carnage, how foolish would i seem?
among the clashing swords and the screeching men,
these teeth-stuck words are nothing to keep,
not in the mouth, and never, oh— never in the heart.
god, but god, if this makes me foolish then i am a fool.
i keep them behind white walls, in chambers; the quiet admissions,
the sharp-granule stones and the pain and the all-too-blatant
cognizance that i can never plead guilty to i love you;
a revelation i’ve never wanted, a revelation i’ve always known.
the words stick to my tongue, resilient and relentless,

i love you, i love you more than anything.
i keep my head high, i keep my eyes forward. i do not speak,
but even if i did, in this thundering silence of justified massacres,
this soft-meant divulgence never could’ve touched your ears.

(all you hear is war and war and war
and his i love you, i love you more than anything.)

to tear and unfurl, suffer. i will have you suffer.
 
resolution: do not let the ocean break us.