ALLEGORY OF THE OX-HEADED GOD

“The only thing in the world that's worth beginning: The End of the World, no less.”

-Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land

Progress, otherwise known as reticent
            hysteria. I won’t repent.

I destroyed something
            I should have loved. Mimicking

the tree that is blooming
            in my mother country,

which is wilting because
            it is in the wrong place,

I lunched on grass with
the angles of my mouth.

Telling me to be civil, white America carved
a shadow on slaughter and called it

an opportunity
for reformation. Look how

far we’ve come. The night
cracked its rancid jaws. I stuck

myself inside
its oblong maw and sawed off

my head. A stone rolling
on the ground

like a consonant.
Revolutionary optimism

is the belief that we
can end something.

What I fear: that another
beginning will nuzzle

its hot mouth into my hands.

Emily Liu is a student at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Illinois. They have been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, International Hippocrates Young Poets Prize, Poetry Society, Pfeiffer University, and Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, among others. Their recent work appears or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Tinderbox Poetry, Hominum Journal, and The Phoenix.