Sophie Yu

Learning to Float

After Jai Dulani

1.

In a small corner shop, they sell names.
Mama drags me over, points
her bony finger to recite:

  If you find your 名字 , luck is with you.

   And so we dive into the pool of sweaty bodies,
   an elbow swinging past my left eye–

   marbles clack against the splintered wood
   separating your fate from mine,

            something glistening in the snow, wild-
            maned and rolling like the tide–
            its forever-periwinkle hum.

            I am fishing through the pearly beads for
            a character.

2.

I am eight, flying
in a tube of my own saliva.
A vent slips air into the crack beneath
my goggles. Teary-eyed, toothy smile.

   I like this blue plastic suit.
   My asthmatic breath snuffs out
   the neon-striped birthday candles.

   The iFLY staff ask me if I’m alright.
   It hurts to breathe, so I ask—
                   Can I go again?

3.

Dull, dead sand dollar lying
in the center of my palm—I never knew
something like this could have been
alive once. Scuttling across the sand
with velvety tube feet—

   I bury the lotus root in sand to say
   goodbye. Soon, it’ll be scrubbed, sifted
   by the waves into a kind of remembrance.

4.

My crossed chopsticks pick up
a slippery dumpling. Steam rises
like silk. I dip the broth-filled pocket
into garlic vinegar, savor
the fish meatball. Fish meatball—
it rhymes with the sound

         wedged between my teeth, the name. Mama
         tsk’s, taps her chopstick
         against her ceramic bowl.

         Eat.

5.

I am swinging mulch from
the bottom of my stained converses, the rusty chain
biting the inside of my knuckle to blister.

 For a moment, my fingertips touch a cloud.

名字: the Chinese word for name.

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/