Evy Shen

home in motions
​     after Grace Q. Song

​​where waters bloom promises of land & lemon halves
sprout horns to exorcise mosquitoes
 
where on the schoolbus we are the bycatch of some
insult sounding like chimes
 
where living room walls scabbed with childhood
flake like identities too [itchy / familiar / foreign]
 
where the orchestra of insects stitch close day-wounds
& every night we’re moon-turned restless in absence
 
where we burrow in the same silence between
stale arguments clenching
 
where we become ambigrams, reconcile flaws
 
where we iron our [bed sheets / postures / America
-creased names] until they unfurl into early fog &
call it repentance
 
where we exist only in the lion hills of summer or
maybe exist in every season but the summer
 
where we sleep at the wrong time to the wrong song
too [tired / awake / sick] to care but who’s to say
what’s better, that orientation from disorientation
 
the blurring / of a scratchboard dawn / with the breakfast pulse /
sirens bleeding / under covers / sweeping hand
of paralysis / slippery-splinter of a heartbeat / two mothers /
too lost / flight repeated out of its motion /
 
how we will be scared regardless.

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Evy Shen is a high school senior from Georgia. Her writing has been published/is forthcoming in Penn Review, Passages North, Longleaf Review, Half Mystic Journal, HOBART, Kissing Dynamite, and Blue Marble Review, among others. When she is not writing, she is outside with her family enjoying God’s beautiful nature. She loves One Direction and rain.  ​