Ellen Zhang
​

Purple Poetry

June, moon, soon - why do the
     most beautiful words rhyme?
Why do only the good
     die young?

There is purple, two syllables
breaking upon salt lines.
This is my mother’s favorite
dress, her dancing to paint walls
with fragrance, stretch marks
dissipating distances. Star-shaped
bruise blossoming like peonies,
unforgiving, unapologetic as
necessity of summer, leaving
only a trail of shredding feathers.
Her handprints & galaxies--
neither comprehensible
to me, then.

Consider the way my father’s
fingernails crescented under
skin like liquid like glass like
knives. Which is to say,
stored, sharpened
words spilling over
like sorrow like blood,
coagulating under
lamplights illuminating purple
promises into darkness.
So easily exchanged: beauty & eerie.

The picture frame cradling this
image of his lanky frame against
knock-on wood door frame.
Don’t you think it depends
     ​on how you frame the question?
Not peonies, but something alighting
red & ready. Folds of purple nights
tingling with day: tasting of sureness,
most paradoxical of hues. Sure,
there is purple, but then there’s this.

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Ellen Zhang is a student at Harvard Medical School who has studied under Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, poet Rosebud Ben-Oni, and poet Josh Bell. She has been recognized by the 2022 DeBakey Poetry Prize, 2022 Dibase Poetry Contest, and as 2019 National Student Poet Semifinalist. Her works appear or are forthcoming in Rappahannock Review, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, Hekton International, and elsewhere.