2020 Student Poetry Award

I was born between clefts of glacier ice and numbers
on checks, scrawled in Chinese penmanship—between cucumber

slices, laid flat on white bread or against bloodshot eyes, aflame
with tiny dragons. The skin under the eye is the most delicate, better

when firm, shows your age when loose. Eye cream with a thousand
ingredients for firm under eyes that glow at night, delicate sarcoma

or milky cataracts in my grandma’s eyes. Green tea with a splash of milk.
If I pull hard enough at thin strings of beauty, her ghost floats through

my lap, a cold breeze in humid Shanghai air. The premature spring
wind will slip through my hair, the trees pink with cherry blossoms,

bouncy locks will fly into the sky, hang off walls, release the aroma of
roses and fertility. They’ll land the way they do in the salon, a cat

from a windowsill. Preferably it’ll happen in public. Validation
at the shaking of dice. Then I’ll see him. He’ll be abnormally tall,

as huggable as an ironing board. He’ll be impressed by my tight
under eyes. He’ll ask. I’ll be the cool girl. Of course I avoided

the overwhelming allure of under eye injections. My grandma
had the best genetics. Cyborg like me. I’ll kneel

before him when he asks, knees on hard ground while he reclines
on the bed that I fluffed. He’ll push my head down, hand in my hair,

it’ll hurt—but he must think that it’s soft. When I go home, my mom
will remark how pretty and flushed I look. I’ll smile in the effortless

cool, dismissive way that I do. Today, I don’t imagine I will be able to
look her in the eye. She paid so much for my wisdom

and look at all of this, this is everything I have to show for it.

Reprinted with the permission of the author.