#helli fang

[kavikshiraj]

if there is a light then i am going to / swallow it. if there is a god then / i’m going to make him cry. (S. Osborn)

a ship undone by the shore, / a knife making love to a wound, the sweet scrape / of a match lighting the lamp of her mouth. (Natalie Diaz)

Once, my grandmother / scooped the Tennessee soil, put it in my mouth. / It tasted true. I wanted more. (Claire Shwartz)

I language her spine against scaffolding, // silk on our cheeks as she scrapes blessing off my tongue / and that night I dreamt of God (Stephanie Chang)

In the black forest / on the other end of Time, you write a delicate O / against the open mouth of wanting (Elisávet Makridis)

Maybe the / only thing we were meant to taste is the flesh // of our own prayers. (Helli Fang)

I want to eat my grief and my god / will not allow it. A lesson / in suffering—O! / but Lord—I have suffered. (Leila Chatti)

[lifeinpoetry]

Outside, I watch my mother break open an egg:

her hands cradling the freckled shell with such mercy, as if she could still hear it breathe, before breaking the surface, a canary’s glass eye

sobbing between her knuckles. How I wanted my body to open that way. As if everything left to swallow in this world was already

inside of me, waiting to fill some stranger’s half-open palm.

— Helli Fang, from “Ignition,” published in The Blueshift Journal

[mortalpractice]

Last summer I learned to walk into an open mouth: white skylines caged around my neck like a city on a leash. I think of the way the boy spoke—as if trying to swallow a plum—& realize there is no easy way to say close. I've fallen into cathedrals and landed on my feet. I've strung and unstrung a cello with my veins, still beating. Because in the dark, what matters most is how the shutter of a throat closes & not how empty it is.

—Helli Fang, from "Wildfire," published in The Adroit Journal

[ihoardwords]

My mother says / there is no use being alive / without a body / I say being alive / makes me want to burn / down a city / skeletons collapsed by light / clouds rushing ahead like / runaway trains

Helli Fang, from “Aftershock,” published in DIALOGIST

[ohconstellate]

I will never know what it means to be afraid. As in compressing a body into a bruise & praying it will never be unclenched. As in boxing a mouth into a sound- proof oven, lungs scattering into a crooked ellipsis.

Helli Fang, “Pulse,” published in The Adroit Journal