Today I drove my car down a hill. No brakes. No seat belts.
Just gravity and I, taken aback by how much we had in
common. We liked the clouds, white bodies with no arms,
daring us to do something about them. Found satisfaction
in the queering of nature’s course, the curvature of light
through prisms, like chromatic filaments shattering from a single strand.
Rejoiced in the irony of it all, that in order to move forward,
we had to first let ourselves fall. Not names though, never
names because names were linear courses. Because gravity’s name
chained it to become a law. Because my name chained me to
an uncertain manhood. And we were both contradictions, parabolas
among life’s lines, high on things untouchable*. The odometer hits free
fall, and gravity has already left me, severed itself from the world. I reach
out the window and carve the rusted air between my fingertips, whittling myself
down and raising a new sculpture in the name of life. Here I am, breathless and
falling, no set course, reanimated like a newborn star hurtling into the night.
* inspired by the novel Untouchable Things by Tara Guha.
Patrick Wang is a senior at Northview High School. His writing has been recognized and published by the New York Times, American High School Poets, and Eunoia Review. When he isn’t writing, he is busy editing Curieux Academic Journal and working on his art, which recently served as the cover art for the Daphne Review. He is a proud defender of minority voices, his favorite television shows, and the Oxford comma.