Sui Wang

All we are made of is borrowed

so we mow the lawn, write down recipes, throw parties,
wake to the pop of balloons. for everything to be taken away.

one summer we slip into the bright kitchen, folding shadows
between rinsed strawberries, our lips find each other, hands still wet.

we dog-ear pages but never turn back. our palms pressed
together: borrowed forkings, misdrawn lines.

we toast with paper cups to inked signatures, recycling
tears into brief brittle oath: “we persist.”

we mend what we can: faucet, clock, chipped mug and
laminated pasts; we trace circles from squares. we say here, here

your palm a compass dialing my pulse north, we get lost
in a fading atlas, riding veins and coursing miles. 

but for now, we name the fruit as we slice it: tangerine,
pear, plum, each fresh rupture sweet on our fingers.

Sui Wang is a poet, fiction writer, and social science researcher living bicoastally. She is a third-year PhD student in Communication at University of Southern California. She currently resides in New York, where she is guided by emotional traffic and poetic architectures. Her literary work has appeared or are forthcoming in Aloka Magazine, wildscape lit journal, and Meniscus Journal.