Graduation 2020

By Maya Somogyi

Seventeen
Addendum quarantine
 
Things with breath:
Wheezed up balloons, water bottles
and their bartered air
dead things, only dead things. Breath
that grasps
 
I was told graduation would be a butterfly
honey-eager and gauzy. I got a net
the leaden moon of it
to prop up the splitting yolk of the sky
 
What did you do? What
did you do?
My shitty, weak wrists
pinned up on the wall like
I might get to hold my friends again.
 
Scream, child. Like
I have breath to spare. An absence
of air lives in me, all the butterflies dropping
as I hoist them between my teeth.
They know
I have nothing to give anyone.
 
The only way to hold my breath is to be a dead thing.
The violent receptacle of my hands
lungs
What can I do? This breathless old tune, like
eighteen is ever coming again 

---

Big Bang Never Ended

By Maya Somogyi

Cell degradation
the dog’s favourite chew toy
looks a little bag-eyed these days
 
Someone gave the grocery shelves
the wrong directions again, so, stay.
Stay. Things are better found
in stillness,
though this is equally likely as anyone
ever finding you again
 
Like cliffsides that forget their face
when met with water
There are no ways for us to stay the same. Oh,
wonder. Oh, sweetness, this miracle
carved itself from you
 
See, the day is not a dog
worming his way beneath the picket fence:
it will not fit. And all that upturned dirt made fresh
that can’t go back
which is the world, which is
responsibility
 
So
Christmas crack of the universe, tremolo   
    a beat     replaced by another
and so we find ourselves
singing

---

Twenty-Year-Old Aftertaste

By Maya Somogyi

​Decade of knock-off Nikes
pooling around my ankles.
Decade of this tired beneath my fingernails
are just coffee grounds. I’ve been
clawing up a life.
 
Twenty-years-old is a long beginning.
 
Everyone your age is an alcoholic they say
like, god, if it was me. They miss the heat
of being flammable but not
how our throats begin to catch.
 
This is the decade when ice cubes,
perfectly submerged, are invisible
to the naked eye but so rarely
does anyone look for me nakedly.
 
Gentle god toying with my hair. A knot
a knot, a knot. I careen
 
off the barstool and drop
a cacophony of years. Caffeine
precipitating on the coatrack of my lungs
I turn out pockets where my hands
find only themselves.
 
I want to walk out the door
so quietly the doorbell will forget
the sound of my steps. Snuff
all the shadows into sun.
 
Now call it shot for the way
I reach through myself and
find nothing, my body sagging.
Decade of
 
whistle my lips to the bottle, I am
used to the locomotion
of hollow jars. How
they ring only when touched.

---

The Sea that Sips Memory

By Maya Somogyi

​The beach
where the stones have made themselves all the same
the clouds, their pallid faces
split wide open.
the blue embraces the sky, the blue
the blue                        
 
It must have been waiting, this
whole time. Now
I can only remember the shape of clouds
with my eyes closed
 
the ocean, swallowed, would taste like milk.
And if I keep my head back, I might step
into the sky. I think, before this
I was scared. The world has no lid and I’m
still scared
 
There’s this rock in my palm, a heart-sized
heaviness. A heart in a fist.
If I throw it, what am I holding onto?
Where
can I put it away?
 
I just got here, I’m remembering
the place I was last in. Even the surf eclipses
all evidence of rain.
I am the only thing left
of my own unhappiness.
 
Oh, how sweet the sea, honey-mouthed
meeting me as a fist.
Imagine thrusting
the stone into the sea.
Imagine
this has already happened
 
Have I forgotten already?
This stone, a battered thing
and I have no idea. No idea
how it got all this way.

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​Maya Somogyi is from the Sunshine Coast, BC. She is currently working toward her BA for Writing and English Honours at UVic. Her writing is informed by her experiences as a lesbian, half-Chinese woman.