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  • Home
  • About
  • Issues
    • A Fire of Words
    • Editor's Note 2022 >
      • The Floor Wallows Lower
      • Cornflowers
      • Erudite
      • That One Morning
      • mom, im afraid
      • selenophilia
      • Roses and Rainbows
      • If a poisonous snake bites itself, will it die?
      • Rochester
      • Crown of Branches
      • Stairs to the Sea
      • A Poem Written Entirely From Advertisements
      • Pyromania
      • silhouette of a bird against winter stars
      • thunderstorm in the bedroom
      • A Night in Recovery
      • sleeping gypsie
      • paper dolls&goodbyes
      • We Are Women
      • Village Air
      • Sunshine's Laughter
      • the male gaze
      • The Forensic Entomologist
      • Lacking
      • Drowning
      • Adelie
    • Create the Wonders We Dream (2021)
    • Editor's Note >
      • Zove
      • I'm Sorry
      • Fake Smile
      • My Friend the Balloon
      • Eyes Intertwined
      • Perfect
      • Only a Moment
      • A Dangerous Word
      • My Dreams
      • The Last 100 Meters
      • The Green Void (Villanelle)
      • The Whimsical Galaxy (Sestina)
      • The Silent Kindness
      • Pressure
      • Table on the Hill
      • The Yukon
      • The Shore
      • Repentance
      • Her and I
      • Infections of the Soul
      • Threads
      • Dream of a High Schooler
      • Empty
      • little flame
      • scars
      • black and white
      • The Cat
      • Joy
      • Sweet Honey Bee Stings
      • If There Were One Day
      • Delete
      • Our Hearts to Central Vietnam
      • him or Him?
      • Ocean
      • Es Llaner Beach
      • Sewn Together
      • Rain
      • Yes, I Like
      • The Legacy of the Moon
      • The Wind Whimpers
      • From Here I See
      • To Feel Clean
      • Red
      • Survival
      • Substance
      • Golden Lies
      • Midnight Tango
      • Ode to a Spleen
      • Modern Siren
      • The Night's Diamond Tears
      • Beats In Double Time
      • A Day in the Flight
      • Carved By Venus
      • Lifeline
      • Everest
      • Education
      • How Much of Reality Can Be Observed
      • What is a Spork
      • What is the difference between love and in love
      • What would you have wanted? me to say
      • Planet Caravan
      • The Journey of a Minute
      • The Circus of Scars
      • Mosaic
      • Color
      • Love and Acceptance
    • Colors I Never Knew Existed (2020)
    • Her Voice Remains (2017)
    • Watch Every Second (2018)
    • Words Become Reality (2019)
  • Blog
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silhouette of a bird against winter stars
​By: Kay Lee


(“Tonight you’re thinking of cities under crowns of snow,             
                 and I stare at you like I’m looking through a window 
                                                                                counting birds.”

           -    Richard Siken, Crush)
​
​
tonight, you’re thinking of cities under crowns of snow, inhaling the cry of the frigid north
wind and exhaling frost onto shadowed panes.
tonight, i’m looking up at the drooping sky
tracing winter stars, pretending that
the sky is not forming canis major and minor into two
eyes with which to stare down at me, silent
as the snowfall that layers without thought.

tonight, i look up and count
the birds, flying between the sharp angles
of the sky, with
noses made of skeleton, wings as wide as glass,
nonexistent lips, pulled into a teethy grin.

i count
one, two, three
birds streak in blurry black
across a hanging sky.

​

​

three.
a magic number, you would say,
looking back at me highlighted by the growing depths
of the sky, skin bleak and desperate.

a train passes, bells ringing something eerie
under the silence of the stars, windows blinking
searingly bright in the nighttime, and your cheeks are pale,
so pale against your eyes,
large and unblinking in the midnight.

the train fades, into the darkness, leaving behind only
the sky, falling to the earth, and the nothing that marks
this location, waiting by the station for the trains
that never stop.
​






“where do you want to go?” you
ask me, smile wide and full of
teeth.
i cannot answer.
i do not know anywhere else.

you laugh, throwing your head back into the sky, dripping
black onto our shoulders, into the terrible face that
the stars make as it leers down
at us.
you’re thinking of snow.
you’re thinking of the next train.
you’re thinking of how there is no afterlife, for us.

i’m thinking of birds.
thinking of counting drowning stars.
of how you look like a monster, as you laugh into
the abyss, teeth straight and fingers rounded as if
you’d killed a man and skinned him alive-
worn his body over your own to hide
whatever hideous thing you really are.

a man, who had stood here before me, under
this laughing night and before a laughing man,
waiting and waiting for something that would never come.

​(i count one, two, three emotions in your eyes-
none of which could build that smile stretching
across your cheeks.)
(maybe this is my punishment.
for what, i don't know.
all i know is this station, the trains that pass by
into the oblivion, and
you.)
Writer's Statement: Kay Lee is a tenth-grader attending Korea International School in Seoul, South Korea. She is currently putting together her writing portfolio and was recently accepted into Juniper's Young Writers Program.
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