Portrait at the Lake
Your eyes heavy, sweet, something
of the color black inside them, how
it never lifts its head to speak. Lips
a sleeping wind. The space moving
around my voice. The night, the way
it forgets itself inside every place
you leave. There’s some meaning to this.
Your legs silvered and spitting light.
The shadows this moment will take on,
later: my frame of reference
for what is still. Nothing about this
is enough—not the hollows of our chests,
not the water neither of us can reach. I swear,
the angles of your limbs, they confuse
the stars. Little murders: your fingers,
not yet broken in this timeline. Your face
unconscionable, shining; the moon
with its mouth moving over your shoulder.
All of this growing into tenderness. Your breath
a foreign object between us, coiling darkly,
symbolic of nothing. The hands of some god,
pausing here. Working around us both.
Tremolo
That was the year I unlearned the piano: just that fast,
like the breeze soft as smolder & its hands in my hair, soundless
in the way that a last breath is. I shook. I wanted to be kissed
& feel noble about it. Or I wanted to turn bayonet,
make it mean something to the earth. Let a thundercloud
lead me in a slow gray waltz, as if my loves might listen
to me then. I imagined my arms as rustle & hum. My face
as water & the places where it falls. That year the colors
were younger & I was singing them all wrong. Moving
in the key of heartsick, which is to say I was dying
in the same small country where I ruined my knees.
Back then only the flowers were lonely. Back then
I had a name for all this.
Your eyes heavy, sweet, something
of the color black inside them, how
it never lifts its head to speak. Lips
a sleeping wind. The space moving
around my voice. The night, the way
it forgets itself inside every place
you leave. There’s some meaning to this.
Your legs silvered and spitting light.
The shadows this moment will take on,
later: my frame of reference
for what is still. Nothing about this
is enough—not the hollows of our chests,
not the water neither of us can reach. I swear,
the angles of your limbs, they confuse
the stars. Little murders: your fingers,
not yet broken in this timeline. Your face
unconscionable, shining; the moon
with its mouth moving over your shoulder.
All of this growing into tenderness. Your breath
a foreign object between us, coiling darkly,
symbolic of nothing. The hands of some god,
pausing here. Working around us both.
Tremolo
That was the year I unlearned the piano: just that fast,
like the breeze soft as smolder & its hands in my hair, soundless
in the way that a last breath is. I shook. I wanted to be kissed
& feel noble about it. Or I wanted to turn bayonet,
make it mean something to the earth. Let a thundercloud
lead me in a slow gray waltz, as if my loves might listen
to me then. I imagined my arms as rustle & hum. My face
as water & the places where it falls. That year the colors
were younger & I was singing them all wrong. Moving
in the key of heartsick, which is to say I was dying
in the same small country where I ruined my knees.
Back then only the flowers were lonely. Back then
I had a name for all this.
Christina Im is fifteen years old and attends high school in Portland, Oregon. Her fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in YARN: Young Adult Review Network, Strange Horizons, Words Dance, and The Adroit Journal, among others. In addition, her work has been recognized in the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, the Adroit Prize for Poetry, and the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.
