said the changeling to the girl
you are in a story about wanting and i know wanting,
always have, and i see how it lives in you like a greenstick bone
slipped out of expectation. not enough to hurt, just enough
to know it is bending where it should not be, too soft to snap
even as it stiffens into place. just enough for your skin’s shadows
to shift and spill over the oddity. this is what i used to think
when i had dreams where my fingers knotted together
and never came undone again: that if they were misshaping
in the way of tree-roots and twigs, then i would not call it
a tragedy. that if it was no longer an if but a certainty, then i
would not call it a tragedy. sometimes a forest burns down
so it can try again to get everything right, but i wonder if
no matter how many names you take, you will always feel
the same twist of wrongness on your tongue. in stories
this is the kind of wanting meant to slot sharply into place,
lock clicking clean, and yet here you are, still searching for
a key that fits. at this point you must be beginning to wonder
whether this was never a keyhole in the first place, but you
keep looking — why do you keep looking? don’t you see already
how that wanting dribbles out of the mismatched spaces,
that constant leak of sap stiffening around the joints of wrists
and doors that threaten to splinter? give a hungry thing a name
and it will condemn you together into the slow crystallization
of its taming. let it run its knobbly courses, wild and strange
and called nothing but free, and it will pool in the grottoes
and hollows of your moth-bitten body, drip and seep into
the earth of you, a part of you and nameless still. except —
except — except — the way you smiled when you said i like
being able to call things mine was tight as a matchstick head
and still wide enough to swallow all the forests of the world.
you would suppose that a heart does not break quite like an old
dry branch, but i know better, don’t i? sometimes it does.
sometimes you have too much want even for two worlds to keep,
even if they share an ocean to hold all the gold that spills.
Quinn Lui is a Chinese-Canadian student and writer attending the University of Toronto. At this very moment, they are probably loitering in a bookstore, spending too much money on bubble tea, or listening to their plants converse with the moon. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in L'Éphémère Review, Synaesthesia Magazine, Occulum, TERSE Journal, and others. You can find them @flowercryptid on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr.