FIONA LU
Winner of the 2023 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
Hunting
On Saturday you went hunting with the brother
whose name you never learned. In a moor shaped
like a fist he prayed and preyed until the lavender
blossoms forgot his face. You watched as he tore
sparrows into endings that sung, minced rabbits
into atlases of light. This was the second time your
brother has tried to teach you about survival. The
first happened at the top of a staircase, where he
taught you that every good son dies when they’re
told to. That he is not a good son. As your brother
draws a blade, unravels the pelts of smaller things,
you wonder what kind of boy sharpens his breaths
to knifepoint. What kind of boy becomes your vice.
But this poem is not about your bruised shins at the
bottom of a staircase. Nor is it about the time he
stuck his hand into a fishtank and squeezed--
no matter how much you want it to be. Rather, it’s
about your brother’s favorite bruises, his calloused
palms, the way he always clasps his hands in apology
before he feasts.
Cities
I’m going to let you
in on a secret: I have
so many ghosts and
nowhere to put them.
This is only a problem
because none of them
are mine. Another
secret: there are no
doors in my city. Just
skies swallowing skies,
streets perpendicular
to grief. Here, I have
gnawed every creation
myth to the bone,
witnessed death in the
palms of splayed hands.
Here, the trees steal
every small murder
and I mistake
my neighbors for
missing teeth. But
remember: before this
city became a city it
was a prayer, a litany,
a thousand whispers
dressed in light.
(In my dreams, I am in
every graveyard shaped
like a splayed hand,
where I fold ghosts
into origami cranes.)
Copyright © May 2023 Fiona Lu
Fiona Lu is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is author of the chapbook, How to Become the God of Small Things, which won the 2023 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. Her writing has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Princeton University, and Ringling College, and has appeared in Kissing Dynamite and Sine Theta, and elsewhere. She is an alumni of the California State Summer School for the Arts, an editor for Polyphony Lit, one of the founding editors of the Renaissance Review and a prose editor for The Lumiere Review. She currently attends the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
