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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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Peels

By Vivian Zhu

I miss you. The city is cold
without you. I tripped over a seesaw
yesterday & you weren’t there

to yell at the bum who pushed me
in your winded, loping accent.
Do you still keep a plate of oranges

on the kitchen table? I used to dig
my fingers into ripeness, tender
rind congealing beneath my nails.

Now, I wish I didn’t see everything soft
as bruised, bent for blows. There’s something
nostalgic about destruction waged quietly,

when relative damage can only be reversed
by further desecration. After I leave,
you paint the walls vermillion to hide

a single bloodstain. Erasure only threatened
when invisibility strains. The fog rolling into rain.
Rain cleansing our city of smog. The years

run away from me, but now I know to hold
the door open. I learn to apologize for everything,
even the things I didn’t do, because memory

is a living thing & hindsight is evolutionary,
undergoing osmosis. The day I left
the sky was the color of blue raspberry sorbet

shot through with strawberry sauce. Honey
& an aftertaste of hope. Back then, I still thought
of the world in terms of sweet things.

Back then, I ate sliced oranges as the train
bulleted out of the city & everything stung
like citrus on an open wound.

 

Vivian Zhu is a Chinese-American writer from Adlai E. Stevenson High School. Her work is published in CHEAP POP, Eunoia Review, and Aster Lit. A lover of all things orange, she can be found peeling tangerines for her younger brother.

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: December 2022

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