will you be my family

By ​Jane Shi

in the plastic reusable boba boy bottle you got from kerrisdale are two sunflowers who have decided to become best friends. you have never asked anyone to be your best friend because the nervous tick of your eye is no match for the small taut string looped inside grandfather’s second hand. you can’t beg against what has already happened in the horizon. the true state of diaspora is merely the imagined distance between the epicenter & nowhere.
  
                                      everything is your fault        

you are deeply entrenched in the religion of distant sirens: letting bodies grow still then lusting after naked others: you won’t be able to offer a big enough feast to prevent the spirits from returning: except: an angry hand against the bare of your back:

your four spines nauseate / you / they / unknowingly then knowingly / hurl you inside the corner of the clock waist your mouth / folded into a broken crane / tilt your ears through / a string clip strike-slip / furniture parts / bump against your neck / you won’t have time left to read the horoscopes /

/ you still hover / over the deaths of those sunflowers /did you put enough water in the bottle why / did you let the budgies stay out in the winter / the suburbs are a laboratory of failed post-cold war social theories / you want to sit out in the sun like those giant blooms / dream of a still yellow now which crumbles / when you wake all you want to do is to squeeze it shut / remain

it won’t taste good: floors scrubbed fourteen times but no slippers to kiss them: spices just sit there: reminder of a failed school project: a proposal cracked inside brittle wood: your mayonnaise frowns like

                                                                ice cream inside compost

these petals drop and wither, like friends that got the best of each other. you collect the pieces as fast as you could. plop your eye inside the bottle. flatten your body inside the longcase, as small as possible. to make up for the mayonnaise.

                                                               will you be my family?
                                                               even after the petals rot?
                                                               even after my hands fail?
                                                               even when my face
                                                               bursts into flames...

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one day I'll leave this town

By ​Jane Shi

continuation of banality (hitting pavement sideways (candle this wax (delivery milquetoast severance (bread waiver sigh scribble (frozen(for 23 years—(cumming on green bedsheets (your neck pin casualty clause (stole & burned his copy (electric whirling counter (tequila eyes meeting (tiny hats lipsticker unglue (i ran into the wrong people for most of my adult life (unglue lipsticker hat tiny meeting eyes tequila (counter whirling electric copy) his burned & stole clause casualty pin) neck your bedsheets) green) on cumming years 23—for scribble) sigh) waiver bread severance milquetoast delivery) wax this candle sideways) pavement hitting banality)))))))))) of continuation
                                                                        one day I’ll leave this town

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Jane Shi is a queer Chinese settler living on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her writing has appeared in the Disability Visibility Blog, Briarpatch Magazine, The Fiddlehead, and carte blanche magazine, among others. She was shortlisted for The Malahat Review's Open Season Award for Creative Non-Fiction. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.