i don’t know what your wedding venue looked like but i know the bathroom ceiling
had no ledges for a nylon rope. eyeliner between hand & throat. girls with
bleeding knuckles. ms. thomassen told me i have a lot in common with her cat
and i almost reminded her that cats cough up their fur in soft tangled spheres
your dress was white like mary’s tunic
but no one pointed out the irony of that on a wedding day
the only time i’ve seen your feet. white nail polish on your feet.
girls hunt birds with bleached feathers just to leave them by locked doors
the bathroom mirror trembles with the echo of your vows. stray cats
scream in the middle of the night & you find
a dead body on your kitchen floor the next day,
not always shaped like a screaming cat. endorphins
trigger the neurological pathways for both pleasure and pain.
i couldn’t tell if you were using a microphone
or if you had said the whole thing in capital letters,
in my head you shove your silver ring right down my throat
years later you walked past me in the bathroom. profanities
salted my tongue like a broken urn. you were
still in mary’s dress but the white cloth soaked & torso naked
i remember you have been crying.
you were holding my throat like a segment of white chalk,
like a revolver’s handle & i was begging you to pull the trigger:
a game of russian roulette, in which the hand that pulls the trigger remains clean.
i forged a religion out of a star only to find that it had been a satellite all along
the stages of grief have been debunked but
i’ve been stuck in the room in which the brand of my eyeliner
is called russell’s sign. if you hated when people swore
i could only imagine what you’d say if you ever found out
that i once purred your name in sacred text. you
threaded the ring out of my throat to find the engravings gone.
in its place: six bullet chambers, labeled sweet, salty, sour, bitter, dorsum,
& epiglottis. the one that kills depends on which god you believe in.
girls take ms. thomassen's course just for units twelve & thirteen.
thickened eyeliners and heads kept low. i made you a god
named after a satellite. like spoiled milk
i rot in the stomachs of all six chambers, hoping to hear you swear at me.
i stare at the clock until i comprehend that it wasn’t your wedding that day but my own
graduation party, and the rope from the janitor’s stall wasn’t even long enough.
every morning i bite off my tail & leave it on your desk hopeful for attention.
cat girls cough up their own fur in perfect little spheres
The 2 am writer that occupies the mind of seventeen-year-old Yun-Fei Wang has taken over her consciousness for the last few years, her inner world expanding into an infinitely inward spiral. She is from Taiwan and has been published (or is forthcoming) in more than 20 newspapers and literary magazines worldwide, including Vocivia Magazine, Jaden Magazine, and Nota Bene Zine. Find her in the evanescence of black-inked words, or at @rainofelsewhere on Instagram.
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