in which we (the moons) pray to become the waters

i’ve never seen mother’s wedding ring. perhaps a glare of emerald,
mother’s favorite color, hidden for its feline deadliness with photographs
of my childhood, my voice encaved in its alcove & watered down

by the vocal cord nodes that flowered in my throat due to crying too much: my
gleaming, rippling heathenness. there is a history of water in this family: the
glittering gutter my dad drove his motorcycle into on his honeymoon, mother’s

tears dancing in our swimming pool, the fang-shaped lake mother attempted
to thrust her body into like a mammath moon retreating into its lair. in second
grade, my chinese teacher told us that in the age of the warring kingdoms, a poet

threw himself into the miluo river because he felt too awake in a current
of drunk & defiled ghosts. people searched in futility for his body: perhaps
he became the river, its waves dancing with skin. perhaps, like mother, he

melted into what he was trying to exorcise. i’ve heard the story a million times:
mother met father on a holiday cruise in 2007, when her hair still split the night air
like jewels & the cries of coyote in american wildfires. she told me that when

they stood by the banisters, the water opened up itself like a word threatening to
engulf her tongue in fire: their golden & sunburnt language. mother was a poet. meeting
your father was like swimming underwater, she said, searching for the wreck of a secret

word and giving your body to the armaggedon of drowning, in which you risk becoming
that word itself. i tell her there is a difference between poets like us, who
comb our teeth in tuneless water, the cosmos of our mouth sharpened like flint, and

ghosts who are themselves made of water. sometimes i think of father as a ghost.
sometimes i look for the middle point between poets and ghosts, traced in the vacuum
of mother’s wedding ring, the putrid interior rooms within my parents’ rooms,

the gnawing & monstrous house in the bridge of mother’s breasts. unlike most chinese
daughters, i took after my mother & paid homage to the sea & its flotsam. & like
most chinese daughters, i tremble in between things. by the coastline, the sea’s

desiccated whisperings unlatches like the pupil of a poet, a ring of phantoms.

---

Ariel Wu (she/her) is a poet from Shanghai, China. Her poems have appeared in Polyphony Lit, Élan, Chinchilla Lit, and more. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers Studio and Juniper Young Writers. When she is not writing about the quandaries of girlhood and over-analyzing literature, she can be found listening and dancing to K-pop.