Elaine Liu
Roche Limit

She wore red the day of her wedding
like every woman in this family,
twenty-four and not yet ripe

but already rotten. Seasons stretched
between fingers, strings of dormant yeast
hung from the village to the moon—

telephone lines for her husband to perch on,
his nose hooked, wires tucked beneath nails.
She tells me desire takes ten yuan

and some change to ferment,
that’s a dozen years
for a human. That’s a lifetime

for a girl. She’s seen one eclipse
and still imagines being that whole.
A veinous omen, complete and lunar.

Born in the year of the sheep,
it was only a matter of time
before I got swallowed too.

In 2015 she tore apart her red dress
to sew me underwear, for that
entire year my hips were tainted

crimson. I want my blood to rust
some other shade, mud brown
to kumquat, artichoke to fern. Asphalt

would stick to my soles
like chicks clinging to a hen.
The years would grovel at my feet,

watch me unzip my breasts, rebuild
the ruined temple of her stomach.
The Game of chicken is different here,

daughters clutch onto her neck,
burnt stars hungry for gravity.
Maladies of this scale

have no cure. Spun out of orbit,
even Saturn would take
twelve years to resurrect.

Elaine Liu is a Homo Sapien who draws inspiration from living on both sides of the Pacific. Recent works have appeared in Stone Poetry Quarterly, Bellingham Review and Folio.