RENOVAMEN

I am drenched in a far-fetched dreary,
of eleven thousand forget-me-nots:
the blue, the upturned bodies,
the ash of shadow to be thumbed away
by the hands of calcified children,
who have slept for so long. . .

& long ago, when they dreamt
of mothers’ dried dates,
mama / magma Medusa poured milk
for their morning mouths,
poured milk / poured unguent,
thickly. . .

She, waking Vesuvius, told him
to find the freedom she was giving;
she turned him from the silvers of children’s teeth
and to the sky— his hands to unpress a pressed fire,
to abyss the unabyssable—
& Medusa, tonguing snakes & tasting for love,
guided his fingers to loosen like a prayer book
for Neptune. . .

& the lover, the lava let out her red viscera
to devour unto the blue, to earth
unto the sea—
& the children slept soundly, their blankets cold
calcium, & awaited their two-thousand year rebirths—
now i observe them in wombs-phenomena,
not mothers’ nor ashes’ but museum glasses’,
where they are arguably
lithopedionic.

By zuyi zhao

Biography:

zuyi zhao is a 17 year old who lives in south florida, where she occasionally complains about the humidity. she has a tendency to wax poetic and often looks to mythology for inspiration. when she isn’t writing poetry, she can be found doing calculus problems. her work has been recognized by the scholastic art and writing awards, and appears in firefly.