Achilles

Tell me a story. Tell me a story where we don’t meet
for the first time in an abandoned mall, where the light
overhead doesn’t slither like buzzworms on skin, where
the GAP dressing room is not cold when you take your shirt off
and press your groin against my lips. Tell me a story where you don’t
take me on a first date in an amusement park you have two free
tickets to enter, where I don’t ride the merry-go-round around you
like I’m driving through a roundabout, where you don’t cup
my head in your hands while we’re on the ferris wheel and you don’t
hold my mouth in your teeth. Tell me a story where I don’t
get up in the middle of the night to pick you up at some girl’s house,
your face rakish, beer spotting red phlegm in your throat, where
you don’t look at me sheepishly, eyes softened into a want
so tender it melts on my tongue. Tell me a story without
saying C’mon, Pat, you know I didn’t mean it, You know
you’re the only one for me, right? It’s just—complicated, and you
don’t get in my car and fuck me half-drunk. Tell me a story
where I meet your parents, where nothing is ever dark,
where my name is not Patroclus, but instead Evie, Angela,
or maybe Sophia, and you don’t need to tell me a story.

三笔画到男

Sometimes I wonder what having a dick feels like,
like how I imagine an angel’s wings on my back
growing hot or how I curl my hand into a fist
and pretend it burns with the Midas touch.
Ada tells me it’s a Me Thing. Childhood trauma,
all that pent-up rage having nowhere else to go
but home. She’s right. It runs right through
homebase, tip pinkish and swollen like the anther
of a spring flower. Pollen seeping out as the pollen sacs
burst, thighs unwinding, shaking—Ada says that’s why
I yearn for positions of power. A defense mechanism.
Something I’ve internalized so I can walk down the street
without collapsing into myself like a Chinese lantern.
Sometimes I wonder what having a stroke would feel like,
that unfathomable moment when something comes undone
through bursting. All that anger dissolved to snow with a stroke
from God or angels’ wings or a stroke of the Midas touch.
If I can’t have one for me, I’ll take one for someone else—stroke
a dick, stroke Midas, stroke God, and maybe three strokes
later I’ll awake anew, to a new letter on my breast.

Claire Zhou is a student currently residing in Suzhou, China. Her work has appeared in Chestnut Review.