Sophie Yu

Little Cities

In one world, we lather moonlight                            between our joints                               like bee balm and soil, plucking myth after myth from our throats                                                              until they are clean. We laugh ourselves full of tears                                                    slick our spines up,                            sucked up, tucked up, dip our heads down                                                          to carve into negative-space.        

In another, I am rubbing                                            these greasy hands                                    on the denim, hot soybean splatter                                                                        on flesh.                                       Fish bones by the potfuls rooting into thick forests of our throats.                              Body evergreen,                                                      overgrown.

My body                                                                                dripping gold                                   from all that moonlight streaming through my body,                                                a weird little city     

/ pretty / smart / skinny                                                                                                                                         to a friend I am shattered                                                             into discarded memory,                      rusted yen, auntie’s waist size sporks, ginger shots                                                    and nucleotides, codenames

 
for my chemistry teacher,                                         a heterogenous mixture (matter),                  matter suspended in song.
I want to fall out                                                                of my body today—
                                                                                        fly today, cry today, try
 

to milk every last whisper                                              from this world today.                                                          We are        
gardeners, ripping weeds                                                   by dirty handfuls of                                 jeans, mother’s dreams
walls & hollowed cities,                                                        salt, bangsnaps,                                               reels & poems,
pages                                                                                         and pages                                                         untouched.

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/