maybe I’ll be in a museum one day.
They’ll put me up for display, tell people
all about who I was. What the size of
my collarbone indicates and how they
ate meat everyday (can you imagine?)
but more likely, I’d lay dead and forgotten
with my left jaw halfway across the continent
and a rib bone under the sea. And not once
in the two-hundred year lives of the 500-billion
population would a single mind dwell on me.
Not what I ate. Wore, thought, said, did, cried over.
And then I’d be nothing but calcium dust under layers
and layers of sedimentary rock on the abandoned planet
(where really who would live there anymore? because that
old thing barely has clean water! and can you believe the state
the atmosphere is in?) crumbling away and then finally, gone even
though I died over a thousand times before that (but really only twice.)
Or maybe we’ll all kill each other before that happens.
Maybe I’ll lay dead and forgotten with my left jaw
blown to bits and my ribs reduced to
atoms. And then a fatty, cloying layer of death and dead and died
would settle over our entwined bodies
and we’d all sleep real well knowing
nobody would ever put us in a museum
because we’ve all fucking killed each other.
And that would be fine, too.
Selena Zhang is a Chinese American high school student living in Montgomery County, Maryland. Her work has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and she loves to write poetry to explore her thoughts, memories, and experiences. She started experimenting with poetry in middle school and it has been a cathartic refuge for her ever since.