Jessica Zhang, Author at Blue Marble Review

take-off at Beirut-Rafic-Hariri

By Jessica Zhang

At parting, our questions mirrored each other:
Where are you going?

You said that we met too late in life.
But I protest; these circumstances

May prostrate at our feet.
Like Nizar Qabbani, I too

Name you my country, dictionaries
Flinging themselves to sea

To hear your greeting,
Each Arabic syllable unraveling

To caress your exhaled breath.
The difference between our words

Is only a small diacritic.
On the page, we are still together,

Stringing verses into song,
Guided by the sway of Beirut breeze,

Your palms upturned
As if in prayer. And in memory,

The dusk folds and collapses
Against the heat of a slow gaze;

My fingers lingering on your brow.
Even now,

I can take short breaths
And still smell the sweetness.

Jessica is a poet from Shanghai. She loves art, music, and Arabic poetry.

requiem for the lost boys

By Grace Zhang

your ancestry is immortalized in a silver bullet. cut
the rotting carcass of your mother tongue & seal yourself

into an empty promise. a silent bid for your grandchildren: ripen the
soles of your callused feet, hide your footprints so that they won’t

tell you to go back to your country. erasure comes in many forms: the tail end of a nebula, the purposeful censorship, the fatigue. when

you first arrived in this country, you told me about the golden arches hanging
like effigies in a stolen sky. you listened to swan lake on the radio because it

was the only english song you knew, threw your body into the depths of
the hudson to shred your sanguine wings. to be american is to fold

your body into a sacred song, to be a martyr plastered on front-page headlines, beloved for your sacrifice in the name of patriotism.

when your corpse is buried, you are only remembered by your
four grandchildren: one for each year you lost in service to this

battered country. they nail your obituary to the ginkgo tree in
your garden. outside, a lone dove sings into the night.

Grace Zhang (she/her) is a poet and student from the United States. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance of Young Artists & Writers and the Live Poets Society of New Jersey. She is an editor for Polyphony Lit and editor-in-chief of The Lunar Journal. When she’s not writing, she enjoys making new playlists on Spotify, grape hi-chews, and mystery novels.

Wild Rose

By Tianyang Jiang

Tianyang Jiang is a high school student who goes to school in Ontario, Canada. They are a National Gold Medalist in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a Gold & Silver Awardee in the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition, and a 2024 Best of the Net Nominee. Some of their works have either appeared or are forthcoming in the Eunoia Review, the Penn Review, the Toronto Public Library’s Young Voices Magazine, and the 2023 Collection of Canadian Poetry. They are also the editor-in-chief of the Demystify Tribune, a virtual news journal that has published over 100,000 words of bilingual youth journalism.

Paying the Debts

By Kayla Simon

Hours of therapy, weeks late payment from my parent’s coat pockets.
Don’t see the nutritionist anymore but she loved to talk about a copay.
I used my gift card to buy a journal & now it sits next to my bed, empty

threat. How do I account for the time between meals? I missed the bus
on purpose, wanted a longer walk. Don’t think Mom trusts me anymore
but we both pretend. In the waiting room, I step backward onto the scale,

ask the nurse to give nothing away. Does the doctor remember me bone-light
at 16? After three hours on hold I give up. Buy every book about the body.
When I can’t fall asleep anxiety presses the blanket tighter, I count breaths

and resist praying, resist resisting. On the worst mornings, sweatshirts
don’t even feel right. In my car, garbage bags of jeans, tank tops, bras
that don’t fit & the reason I’ve kept them so long is embarrassing.

buzzing, the new therapist takes payment over Venmo.

Here’s to everything insurance doesn’t cover.

Kayla Simon is a May 2023 graduate from the University of Connecticut, where she majored in English with a concentration in creative writing and double minored in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Communication. Her work has previously been published in New Square, Grub Street, Long River Review, and Red Cedar Review. When she isn’t writing or reading, you can find her taking photos for her photography business or looking at the stars.

Winter Lemon

By Cecilia Januszewski

It’s brisk

And smells like the stars are thinking of snow on my way home from ballet class.

I have leather soled shoes that make me sound like a horse on the sidewalk
And am still sweating under my trench coat. I am running late
To bake with my neighbor. We do this every week.

Tonight is lemon meringue pie,
Which comes out runny and yolk yellow, smelling like marshmallow and citrus.
We cut it before it’s cool and eat with spoons,
Standing quietly over the kitchen counter.

Outside the sky stretches thin and gray
And the sidewalks flex in anticipation of winter.

Inside, my apartment shimmers lemon yellow
And the warm scent of sugar glows,
Diffuse and golden, against the cold.

Cecilia Januszewski is a senior at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she studies linguistic anthropology. She is currently editing the manuscript of her first novel and has been previously published in Manuscripts, Quibble, and Quabbin Quills, where she is now an editorial board member.

Petrichor

By Eva Skelding

Not a prayer, really, but something like a spell. Enough to slip to the surface of truth.
I step into the yard and the mourning doves firework into the grey.
Soften the sleet-slick bones.

Flood, or cleansing: flip the coin.

After the storm, the air hums. Pools stretch thin enough to hide an inch of depth,
or burrow between the broken ribs of the earth. Superposition, until the splash.
I’ve given up guessing.

From the window, air blurs into mosaic. I stir my coffee and fragment the cream-heart.
What we need to stay awake: throat, breath, warmth. Hook & eye,
for the world we weave with words. I have left only blue and grey.

Without thunder, the thinnest things seem intact.

Remembrance, piano, overripe pears. So many synonyms for leaving, or lingering too long.
Yeats: Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

To think: something might still be awakening.
The ache in my wrists. Achromatic afternoons. Achilles, ink-stained heel. Anchor the chaos,
or alchemize it into an orchestra. Cauterize the echo, or it burns through the rain.

The present will poison you more than the past. In time, the fray of thread withers.

Listen closely and imagination stitches together the gaps. Patches in the voices
down the street, the face beneath the red umbrella glossed with monochrome.
A snatch of meeting, undertone of a phone conversation. Gesture brushing into embrace.

I remember now:
Cyclic connectedness, that is to say Carl Jung’s collective unconscious.
Raindrops populating in the troposphere and cumulating on the concrete.
Everything falls (again / in the end).

Eva Skelding is a young writer from the Boston area. An avid poet, she loves exploring quiet and beautiful emotions through imagery and symbolism. She has previously been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and has attended several creative writing programs, including the Iowa and Kenyon workshops for young writers. When she’s not writing or reading, you can find her practicing calligraphy or curating Spotify playlists.