Helen Gu
how to write end credits
1. In the city we always end up leaving, air blisters like the palms of a girl’s swollen hand. Rough as post-apocalyptic skyline, handprints churning sweat into the ground. I stood like a landmark in the parking lot. Feet deep on the pavement like a stop sign bending from the weight of a crashing car. The last time I saw myself in the reflection of the rain water, New York puddled my body to the asphalt and died before I could dry. When we left, the airplane rose up past the city as I looked down, body drenched in the condensation.
2. I am always yearning for something else — one more week to live, one last exhale. One more word wrung from my mother’s mouth. Once I
3. touched a dead squirrel on the side of the road, its eyes shut so tight that they were almost breathing, fur crawling alive with flies.
4. I wondered how many flies my fingers have kissed.
5. Overhead, the sun slips under its lifeline.
6. How much do mayflies love in a day?
7. Breathe in the smoke. Breathe out semicolons until the sentence fizzles into the shadow of a full stop. It will always reach out, hungering for closure. My ribcage is wasting away beneath a splinter of body, breaths of air pressed into the canister of my palms. I imagine my mother sitting on the side of the hospital bed, listening to my great aunt’s last heartbeats. How it feels
8. to touch the face of a life slipping away.
9. It must be soft, to run a finger along an unbreathing septum. To deflate a body into a body. The weight of a memory is so heavy that I don’t know if it is even there.
10. The aching of the ceiling fan, always soft enough to ignore.
11. Never mind that. Restart.
12. Behind the shower curtains, the water ashes onto my fingers like bullets to a detonated corpse.
13. When I wear my mother’s sweaters, I imagine my forearm falling apart like the polyester threads unraveling on the sleeves. How everything is eating away at the strings. How everything is spitting them back out. Then I imagine the fibers of my own face piled on the floorboards.
14. I am knitting them into something equally forgettable.
15. Two decompositions, kissing on the sidewalk. The sun is setting over the concrete ground, dying rays seeping into the cracks like spit. They are holding hands with each other. Somewhere along that process someone’s skin cells rot into another’s until they are a cosmic flurry. Somewhere, someone is shedding pieces of body after pieces of body, bathing the air in dust. I am holding hands with the worn down bits. At the crossroad, a train speeds by on the railroad. The skyline, blistering with secrets. This is the only interaction we will ever have until we die. She turns around to tap my shoulder: Should I turn until I walk to
16. the end?
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.