what was grown (in the garage)
by Isabelle Lu
i.
My father / never nurtured anything / but clay-bound things / which—like hands / only unfurled once a year / In the backyard / among them / I bound my knees / Fixed them / with a wax kiss, then coddled all his / gardens. Every cerebral daughter / that I thought’d be given forever / crumbled. Some relic of catalytic iron / bypassed good pastor walls / with a knuckled / shiver / How they trembled, my baby / the thunder beneath the lid of my throat / Lop tongue / tinged verdant like / their furtive petals / preening the burn skid on each leaf / Locating the ever-absent flesh: no scarlet-run nectar / to suckle and thumb / over my chin as I readied to rupture / at another soft palm / I wasn’t made for a caress, I was made to scream.
ii.
the good moon ladles the river.
I stagger onto its bank: nymph but gritting,
dissolved but cartilaginous.
the ants in my marrow unearth no bone memories but how to linger. & I
swaying want to ask everything of the waiting water. tonight,
just this: why, like my mother, I forgot how to
bloom.
the river keens back her only chore to pass on.
all my elegies close
like my father’s cereus.
a note in Ravel's string quartet in F major
by Isabelle Lu
somewhere in a concert hall swoons a brightness
like a belly, and us only brushing the poppies festooned about it
guzzle in through the doors sit
smooth the creases of the program in which the portraits of robins ready
to chase one another, like string animals legged ones.
there’s a note in which a bird’s breast shatters against its violin. guide him
that is, Ravel stroking the feather the aged player
which sprouts again upon first touch of callus
to twirled gutsting in the assez vif.
since I entered this chamber I couldn’t amass the brawn to virtuoso.
I watch fastidious Ravel caged by abstraction after the taxi
strikes. and now us passing the blotches
of his easiest melody between fingers unspeaking like children.
the bough of my neck slips under a slim and forgiving machine.
we lie
as if the world would end here, where something painting pale fire
thinks of us kindly and grants this: that I could never stand
that which I couldn’t bow to. listen:
in his branches is preserved strange music. it becomes
something to rock within irises
golden watching the bows heave waiting for them to burst.
About the Author
Isabelle Lu is a Chinese American writer from New York. She currently attends South Side High School, where she is the co-editor of Context literary magazine. In her daily life, she may be found doodling and enthusing about books to unsuspecting innocents.