The girl who sat down for a minute was used to being in a million places all at once, was used to being a million different people she had to be. She once served as the executive director of the turmoil clean up team back home, but that was years ago. I heard one day she abruptly quit, suddenly walking out through the sliding glass doors in the backyard and dissolving into the bodies of the garden shrubs. Before that she was a computer algorithm: all squared edges and right angles. So perfect, she turned glass into diamonds and diamonds into dreams. She was crafted with so much flawlessness, there is a rumor she invented Tetris in her sleep. She didn’t know the answers to everything but there was absolutely no indication that she could have holes in her logic, in her understanding of anything. She left that position when she started to feel there was, at her center, a liquid core that was starting to corrode her hard drive. For years she tried to patch up the tiny leaks but as it turns out, she wasn’t leaking: she was simply made of water. Then one spring, I caught a glimpse of her in the river. By this time, she was a fish so dazzling, so green and iridescent, like a stained-glass window illuminated by only moonlight. As an aquatic animal she’d never appeared so free to me: similar to a riptide or a surfboard lying on a mirrored lip of the earth’s palm. Obsessed with the feeling of going fast, she learned to swim at speeds of 500 knots per hour and I’d often hear stories of her appearing one morning in San Diego and re-emerging in the Atlantic at dusk. And the girl was very happy… except she sometimes had a feeling of an abundance so dynamic and volatile she wished she could hold her breath for days and become completely invisible. Sometimes when it was quiet, she wondered if it’d ever be possible to swim fast enough to catch up to herself… after all, in the ocean, few things can be truly tethered. And although the girl was a fish, in her soul she knew she still had hands and feet and thus an insatiable need for touching and feeling the textures of things that wouldn’t fade or liquefy in an instant. Realizing this came as quite a shock to the girl – she had to climb out of the sea and perch on the warm and inviting sands of a nearby beach. It was on these shores that the girl saw the chair. Not knowing if she’d even be able to relax, she crawled over and then she did something incredibly foreign. The girl felt her fins change into hands and feet and she let out a breath so deep she felt her lungs growing again like trumpets. Before she knew it, the girl had sat down for a minute, and then another, and then another few…
Molly Zhu is a Chinese American poet and attorney. She likes to write about alter egos, chasms, dreams, tears, rage, translation and the women in her life. She was twice nominated for Pushcart prizes and has been published in both print and online journals including Hobart Pulp, the Ghost City Press, and Bodega Magazine, among others. She is the poetry editor of Passengers Journal, and she is the winner of the 2021 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize awarded by the Cordella Press. Her debut chapbook, Asian American Translations, is now available for purchase.
