If I rewind the clock, this is what I’ll see.
 
Your truck drawing in dust as it spins away from Purcellville, Virginia.
My pursed lips and your toothy smile in front of the U-Haul, leaves defying gravity.
Returning the bouquet of lilies to the cashier, who doesn’t ask why I’m dressed in black.

1
            I am confronting an SAT mock test at eleven o’clock at night when my parents tell me to pack up necessities and leave the house immediately. In the last few days, I had read posts on neighborhood lockdowns every minute: restrictions on Covid in Beijing are tightening day by day, and the rumor of a citywide lockdown was spreading like wildfire.

with each slice
you become another
if she cuts you in half
I know

I want
to live in the sky
to float
with the birds

​I search for four leaves,
the luck I will need
For I fear life itself,
 
I wish you to pay no heed.

A crow came to visit me the other day,
his luscious and auntful feathers stuck out as he expanded his midnight wings
There was a shade cast upon me, as he softly spoke about his tumultuous travels
His unfaltering grief poured out of his beak as the clocks stuck to his legs ticked quietly The black tints on his feathers faded to gray with every little insignicant word he uttered 

​

your body placed into
two caskets. one: spread-eagle
below a rain-battered ground,
navy blued in the front edge of dusk. 

​

​Put me in a room full of mirrors
and watch me crumble.

I had a dentist's appointment one day. At first, it went as usual. Lying face up at the ceiling while a stranger shoves metal objects inside my mouth, accompanied by the occasional wince in discomfort whenever she happened to strike a sensitive part of a tooth. I stared at the TV attached to the ceiling the entire time, drowsily watching the cartoon characters dance across the screen. It was boring. So boring that could feel my consciousness slowly drift away from reality. But that’s when it happened.