Editors: Amy Li and Alloe Mak

I
Dark ink prints
Of stone-cold buildings and age-old trees
Flickered with golden heat
That wafts under the grasping wind.
A girl that picks white clovers
from the envy green of her dreams
sits in between.

II
On my way to Ascension Hall
there is
a white tree and a green tree.
The white one mists on top of the green one
like the immortal mountain under the quill of
an emperor that lives to seek the elixir.
A blue breeze approaches with an awakening stroke.
The white tree and the green tree
rustle with
a few regrets and a few resentments to speak.
The green tree looked up and sighed
“You are so white.”
The white tree looked down and sighed
“You are so green.”
Beside my feet,
there lays fresh
a white leaf and a green leaf.

III
Dusk. Time with a passé whisker points to
the direction of the drooping sun
with a number and a song.
We ran by a bookshop’s glass window
You shared a glimpse at me — and all of a sudden
I wanted to tell you
that the far side giggled a blush
colors of the eye shadow palette
you’d never let me use,
but it looked almost
as pretty as you.
And that on the far side
clouds like old sweethearts
hung around.

IV
Night. More silent as the bugs feebly screeched, like
the shivering bow of a dying violin
that was my brother’s years ago.
And him years ago
would gently pinch the beetle in its black shroud
crawling on my skin this American night
with Chinese stories of damp grass and miry ponds.
Him now
would stay with me over this American night
with a calculus practice and a vocabulary list from A to Z.
There are bikes on the side of the gravel alley.
I remembered how wide
his two hands parted from each other
to show me the size of a large boisterous perch
he caught years ago.
Off the handle.

V
Behold, a racoon you’ve never seen,
with footsteps so soft,
the stone porch rippled in beat.
Flash, its asphalt eyes turn into
the edge of a killing knife
slipping through the thin film of your quivering heart,
opening up a channel to the human world.
The racoon leaps into
the trash of my photo albums.

VI
By the stairs carved with ash-white waves,
fireflies ignite summer’s evil spirit.
Black phantoms clutch their claws onto
lanterns half neon-green, half vanishing
into the dead village of my memory.
They are called “ghost fire” by villagers who
cooked us hand-fed chickens and muck-bred bullfrogs.
On a night so malicious that we could see the stars
a sonic spinner and friends that cramped in a mini van
were enough.