euneirophrenia
by Allison Zhuang
here’s to the youth i could only have in dreams: suspended in the temperate nowhere between blindness and longing, laced boots splashing chlorine from the glassy puddles underfoot, the breathless air lulled in a wisteria haze, nested in rust-red ribs, let us wet the concrete with dying footprints, bleeding honey, flaunting silly truths and precious dares; let us
breathe
each other in and drape laughter over yearning; welcome the green grass stains climbing over our knees; wash our voices over each other’s, 5 existences intertwined; (we don’t worship the gods because we are them) us, pooled in dew beneath watchful golden streetlights; what could’ve been, swaying in the shadows.
the orchestra of copper sequoia surrounds our very own twilit galaxy. us, young enough to hunger; us, old enough to hurt. together in a ring, together in our years, let us pledge our bodies to temporal
ruin,
carve open our souls to sip upon milky emergence, swim with our silent, submerged dreams and hold our friends always this close;
whispers the cobwebbed after-hours fountain:
you will, you will, you will
ax^2 + bx + c
by Allison Zhuang
i can’t see the bottom of this black pond.
two koi circle; your wrongs sink and my remembrances float.
who is this? it’s not you on this trembling glass.
to recall is to miss.
red-blossoming swimmers must have been lost
in communication because there are too many unknowns.
i’m sketching the parabola of you
but in this murky pond, there are only two
fish–as many fragments of truth i needed minus one.
f(x) = ax^2+bx+c
three variables for a, b, and c, three
points to articulate a parabola’s spine,
raising its sunlit arms to face the sky or
hunched, bleeding out on cracked earth.
just one koi too few.
my graphing notebook tells me: insufficient information; infinite solutions; the answer
could be anything (there is none).
the water swallows the crumpled parabola into its void.
so i’ll bunch up my paper resolve and fold it into flowers to drop at your door.
slinking away, i’ll scour the bottom of this cold pond for redemption and you.
About the Author
Allison Zhuang is a poet from Palo Alto, California. A current gap student and an alumna of the 2019 Kenyon Review Young Writers Summer Program, her work aims to explore the self and express the inexpressible. When in the throes of writer’s block, she can be found punning, singing, collecting manatee plushies, or exploring Northern California’s beautiful coasts.