January

after Rick Barot

I. 2020

When the end of the world begins, I try to keep a journal. Tally casualties. Chronicle the folding
of bodies like laundry. Over the last rainbow, the sky ruptures in seltzer water craters & I
integrate its slow oxidation. School days blur & blend together. The teachers trace origins of life
back to their silent graves; say it’s too late to save us. We eat lunch on the front lawn, astroturf
fossilizing in our skin when they break the news. In sudden transit: we crumple, crack along the
pavement like porcelain dolls fated to die. Crumple our sandwich wrappers. Clean out our
lockers. Then, the year erases itself before it has the chance to begin.

II. 2021

After these little deaths, I lose my ticket to heaven. On the first day of lockdown, I pretend I’m
on extended spring break planning a vacation until certainty slips through my fingers & I forget.
I forget the snug pull of fabric against healthy skin, the way a routine shimmies clean into days
straightened still. At best what I know of time is the thinning space between light: how it burns
in the loneliest blue. Once, I read that blue is the color of surrender, that it spans infinities yet
strangles our breath away. I remember this when I unearth my journal from last year, a relic
shrouded in skyborne blue: the hue of memory before the forgetting. Though I shouldn’t forget
this year, I unspool its scars, peel its calendar pages off the flaking white walls. This is all I can
do: free today into tomorrow & flee.

Serrina Zou is a first-year undergraduate at Columbia University. She has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program, the Poetry Society of the U.K., and Frontier Poetry, among others. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Cosmonauts Avenue, AAWW: The Margins, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.