There was something in the night
by and published in Edition Eight of Pomegranate
There was something in the night
touching our faces. We had packed
apples to eat by the lake, and when
we reached the centers we found
that the cores were nothing but heat,
each wisp of flame redder than any
apple and impossible to feel the push of,
hard against the teeth, and then the tears
came easily, even as I tried to bury
my face in your arms. From the lake
they came to drink our tears, hunched,
backs making shapes in the water that
were unlike anything we had ever seen,
their eyes not the color of moss,
exactly, although it was hard to tell,
and when we woke it was as if
they were there and not there, the ripples
moving out slightly beyond where
our fingers could bear to touch. There must
have been no salt in that water. No wonder
they were hungry. Or maybe they had
migrated from the sea once, forgetting
their forms as they came, and now
they crowded in the cold, waiting.
Can you imagine it: what we had
only we could give them. Walking
down the streets at night, it was as if
they had followed us, there, nudging
at the edge of the shadows as if
they could gnaw us free, and if they could
would everything be flooded with light,
the outline of my cheek, your arm
that you hid from me, everything
so clear that how could we bear
to look. And if we could close our eyes,
even then the shapes might take on form
beneath the lids, so that we could see
lines and colors not as they were
but sharper, and a few tears, flatter
than coins, would slip into our palms.
Afterwards the lakes sprouted inside us,
and when we opened the rooms to let
the rain sifting in press between our bodies,
we always felt our water growing. We
touched each others’ hair and the rain
kept on coming. Remember those lovers
that could not be together in life. How
the earth burrowed into their mouths.
Until they were all earth. How the earth
burrowed into their mouths until
they were all mouth. Until out of
their mouths pushed two white butterflies.
And what if those lovers, unsatisfied,
were to return, pressing against
the neck of a sleeping woman or
cupping their wings tightly in drinking water,
until we wondered at the dry brush
at the back of our throats and felt, days
later, our bodies moving with an urgency
not our own, and when you placed
a kiss between my shoulder blades,
would you be surprised to find a tiny cut
on your lips, afterwards, as if there
some creature had pushed across
its wings? They could replace us and
we could never know. Perhaps
we would like it, then, the way the air
touching our hair in the mornings could make
our hair feel lighter, how even sunlight
over a cup could make us cry, as if
we had left these bodies once, already.
Sharon Wang
Sharon Wang is 21 years old and currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis.