Sophie Yu

Elegy for the Sun-Crushed Backyard Jasmines

My mother is in the kitchen again, sugaring
heirloom tomatoes. Our neighbors are afraid
to leave their houses. Still, I am barefoot, knees
steeled against the cold bathroom tiles. My mouth wide
for a scream as this carcass—cardia, ribcage, ripped vessels,
vestiges of yesterday’s dinner—undoes itself. I have mastered
this kind of erasure. I have polished the memories of this self,
the bitterness of lemon rinds and lotus roots into a slow decay. I string
rage and stilted silences from my fists to my throat
as my mother hands me bowls of diced watermelon, praying
for a remedy. A woman in a girl sees a girl
in a woman. I am ashamed. After the apocalypse
there is a larger apocalypse. My father shatters
the doorknobs with his guilt. Still, my body feels
foreign. The room spins so rapidly, it vanishes for days—
my glass hands, glass body too. I am ashamed. The sun searches
within me for more to burn. I drink vinegar like holy water,
as if there is more to cleanse. My body offers a bed of promises;
they’re too delusional to flower. From my lips,
a thousand moths flicker. What’s dead is dead.
They, too, have begun searching for new light.

Sophie Yu (she/her) is a student poet at Phillips Exeter Academy and a New Hampshire Teen Poet Laureate. She is a published author of two poetry collections, as well as the co-founder of Nova Literary Magazine. She is also an alumna of the Sewanee Young Writers Conference and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers Program. Her work has been featured in Spotlong and Eunoia Reviews, and recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, both regionally and nationally. This past summer, she served as an intern for the Academy of American Poets. If you can’t find her in a warmly lit cafe, she is most likely scrapbooking in her room with jazz blasting and a hot cup of jasmine tea brewing on her nightstand.

Literary Magazine: https://www.novalit.org/