By: Quinn Lui

 

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              you practiced the shipwreck
together: thrice a week, an hour
              each time. flooded the stage
and called every ritual violence
              some strange affection,
shared breathing in hiding
              through splinter-shard reeds,
fingers circling your own wrist
              like a plimsoll line. that’s where
her hands stopped, pulse paused,
              started unloading secrets
that linger ghostly among the waves
              even now. wooden boat-bones
surging from the lining of
              her throat and both of you
dead in the water or perhaps
              never not dead. every movement
certain as ice-melt or incision,
              severed from landmass
and sutured with unlight. underwater
              for years before she whispers
she doesn’t think she can forgive this
              and you tell her you understand.

 

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Quinn Lui is a Chinese-Canadian student who has a tendency to collect too many mugs, then dry too many flowers, and then run out of mugs to store them in. Their work has appeared in Occulum, Synaesthesia Magazine, Augur Magazine, and elsewhere, and they are the author of the micro-chapbook teething season for new skin (L’Éphémère Review, 2018). You can find them @flowercryptid on Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, or wherever the moon is brightest.