Helen Gu

Abecedarian As Last Supper 

After today, I’ll swallow the violation like shots of cough syrup
in my sixteenth birthday cake. I’ll leave behind only smoke tendrils,

breathe my tongue into silence. Between ceiling fans and police station
I shroud myself with fabric cutters, waiting for a chimera or

casualty. Tonight, I cannot look the girl in her mirrored eyes. I cover up
her face with my fingerprint. She lifts up the strap of my sundress

delicately—afraid of tearing what’s already torn, longing
for a dead daughter enshrined by a wanting already

executed. I hunger for endings to cleave a wound that
cannot sew itself shut. To quiet a bloodstained girl, screams

floating faceless in the doorway. To savor the loss feeds the famine
until the body ravishes to bone. Stripping flesh from thigh,

gloved hands feigning touch. I, iridescent girl, obstructed by
transparency. I dress myself in shower curtains. My knuckles

harden into coral reefs. Unwiped walls frost over with the grime
of spoil— the dirtied soap slips away. I, skinless scarlet

ibis clawing red and raw. Someday
I’ll drop dead, feathering, and wait for

judgment— there are a million reasons why a girl refuses to stay inside
her body: she feels bloated/she was certain she was

loved/she is nothing more than ruin when she is bodiless/to die here
is to surrender. In the supermarket or at the dining table, my skin

mottles with guilty verdicts, almost small enough to forget.
I can only swallow so much today because the hull is

nameless. Today, I reflect onto every surface. I am shop window,
windshield, puddle after a storm. I am teaspoon, beer bottle,

oven door, computer screen. A nest of fractals reflecting warped
frame, never a singularity. Tonight, I step on the scale and

pretend I am five or seven or ten pounds lighter. I want to squeeze
my body into negative space without

questioning my womanhood. As girl: wrists like bird legs, light
enough to splinter. As girl: spilling over denim waistband,

retching over toilet seat. Knuckles flowering enamel, eroding
into pulp. I run five miles outside and trip over my

shoelace.The breath of pavement festers on my tongue: salted
gravel between my teeth, the flavor of girlish

trepidation. When I come home again, the lights swallow
the shadows scaffolding my pathway. Everything is

ugly here: how darkness shrouds this unwanted
relic, unpleasant overcoat gone

viscous with sweat. My face spits darkness off the window
glass, only a shadow peering. Outside, the bulging gibbous

waits to wane. I, too, have waited for vacancy—only
for thirty seasons instead of days. Tonight I’ll chew

xylem and pretend I like the taste of the strings pulled tight
around my half-rotted teeth. And I yearn for

yearning: the yellow-throated seasons that spit in passing.
My lifeline trickling away—a button, or a

zipper, or another inch between the fabric and my body.

Helen Gu is a 16-year-old poet based in California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Eucalyptus Lit, Eunoia Review, Scapegoat Review, and Neologism, among others. She is an alum of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio and has been recognized by the Alliance of Young Artists and Writers, Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate Program, Bay Area Creative Foundation, and more. She is the editor-in-chief of Winged Penny Review. When she is not writing, you can find her obsessively singing opera arias, perfecting her homemade boba drinks, or re-reading Pride and Prejudice for the hundredth time.