What It Takes To Turn Into Sand — May Lin
I never showed you our dance
last night, you told me twenty minutes
only but I waited for an hour,
or maybe two, or maybe another thousand
I sat on the ground ass-cold, twirling the edges of
a hula skirt laid edges coming undone
On a saturday morning, you burned
mugwort leaves on the soles of my skin
weedy spitwads
I shoved cards through my back pocket
and they fell out like pennies, penetrating,
clanging tight Chinese feet turning into sand
we stormed into a supermarket ransacked
the aisles for rotten bananas and waxy grapes
My hands soiled but my mouth
watered as I gnawed on a bitter note, a bonded note,
what once was teeth latched to a shedding breast
clenching the last of a mother
At twenty three, I stuffed crumpled bills down the sack of a hong bao,
sealed it with milky spit then
mailed it across the silk road where you would
find it on your street, disassembled, and think: this is my daughter
who half-assed her way through my life
An aspiring poet and writer, May Lin is a fourteen-year-old student who lives on the coasts of Northern California. When she is not writing, May is studying or volunteering at her local Chinese after school.