Vivian Zhu
Seas away from home, I surrender
to my father & his
father, our faces impassive
with stiff upper lips
to conceal our sorrow
for the skulls of seasons.
As always, there is no tongue between us
save for the rifle-patter of violent
rain, my tongue blood-thick
& listless beneath the roof
of my mouth. No roof over our heads. No tears
permitted / save for what the rain can hide.
My father murmurs to his father,
straining against the jaded stoicism
taught by our forefathers. 爸, he pleads,
his tongue softer than my ears’ memory,
don’t leave me here
alone. Time lingers like a son in wait
for a scolding that will never come.
The horizon parallels our reminiscence
into pseudohistory. A bedtime story: tears shed
over board games, the moral in my father’s hand
heading toward my cheek,
hesitating: to teach a son to harden
or to heal. As a child, my father wore the imprint
of his father’s hand.
At seventeen, my father sent a bottle
bobbing toward the horizon,
a promise in its belly: 爸, he wrote,
I’ll stop being so soft.
In another lifetime, his father
swam to shore with an oath
tucked between his teeth, eyes drowning
out gunfire & acid rain, ancestors & war
drums. He thought of his father,
facing death with a hardened face,
& vowed to leave his tears
at sea. By the water, decades later,
my father’s cheeks taste of salt. This rarity
unlocks the floodgates in my own eyes—
eyes that will water & resurrect the lonely
isle where my father rises from his father’s
deathbed & asks me to walk
with him to the frozen harbor. To the graves.
To the sea we learned to swallow
instead of shed. I linger a step behind
& watch my father’s callous shoulders
distort into a trembling silhouette
as the rain bullets through us
like a father / allowed to weep.
Vivian Zhu is a student at Adlai E. Stevenson High School. She has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, the Pulitzer Center, The New York Times, and Bennington College. Her work is published in Best of the Net, Diode, Longleaf Review, CHEAP POP, and elsewhere. Chances are, she’s currently procrastinating on calculus problem sets by watching an unhealthy amount of spoken word.
