Polaroid Blues by Serrina Zou
All her life, she held the sky like a song,
softness in the distance between remiss & remission. The doctors documented the plastic invasion,
the knots of fishnets along the shoreline of her womb lining, pink & peach-worn like the daughters it carried.
I was born by the typhoon’s fever dream, a sister
to the sand that she once spit into pearls.
This, she says, was an omen—an oyster for all the blue I could not swallow. If what she wills is true,
every time the frame shifts, there will be another mother for me to look after, another girl evaporated to salt.
So I learn to cry until the ocean turns blue.
The gods whisper to us. We take their blessings in windchimes against the crashing tides.
& instead of shrouding me into the daughter
I am meant to be, she points to the wandering waves, where whales sew the water into symphony.
Like a sky at our feet, she breathes.
Pausing, she presses her lips to my forehead. When the clouds part, we both know:
there is no camera to capture
the sky after its bath, only our poem molten with fistfuls of indigo.
On this page, it caves.
SERRINA ZOU is a recent graduate of Columbia University. Her poetry and prose have been recognized internationally by the Margaret Reid Poetry Prize, the Bridport Poetry Prize, the National YoungArts Foundation, and the Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize, among others. She has been nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize and 2023 Best Microfictions. Serrina's work appears or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, OSU: The Journal, Passages North, and elsewhere.
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