Note: The italicized lines are directly borrowed from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.
Roy Zhu
Bringer of light; root of a sacred tree
your names multiply as you turn out
the roundness of this world. I see you
dreaming spirals; nebula; the palimpsest
beneath my lover’s palm; machine code
to our first breath, that breath inherited
from our last common ancestor. Big Bang,
big auntie whose hips and calloused hands
dance an old loose rhythm one last time.
The weight of this world swings around me
like fists, like pendulums, like anchors
tied fast to my navel. Emerging in fire,
I thought I was impossible within myself.
All I saw was motion, a blurred crisis
(axis mundi: revolver that turns on myself)
before you broke me down. You dilated pupil,
opened stomata. Entered the chambers where
my mothers are kept. Said I am still here.
The world wants you wherever you are.
I confess I hunted you the way they did,
seeking to pierce you through the breast
with the tools that they have, taxidermied
butterflies; miracle pills that mined you
for answers to genetic despair; I once paid
collateral in the pursuit of other deaths.
Is it possible to untangle myself from time?
How do I wander the archive of your breath?
In the dark laboratory I see glowing maps
lit by the lines that lead to you, thickets of
shadows—names for the weeping animal
inside of us, our mirrored taxonomic selves
splitting the many ends of the long hair that
weaves our being and our destiny together.
I want to live inside my name, remembering
a depth that lives on inside me. I desire you
before I understand you, the heart I beat for
you moon of my blood-feral tides, inside me
and beyond me at once, a child I bear with
the face of my grandmother. Ancestor, you
have already found me, alone in the night
I have forgotten you; killed you; promised you;
married you; I have become the branching
weft of you; each body I touch another warp
until I traverse the eternity in all of us, until
we embrace in the moment you died and I came to light
And then the time in me will hush so
I can hear you breathing: my wild truth;
you beautiful puzzle; this air that holds me now.
Roy Zhu ‘25 (they/them) is a senior studying Creative Writing and Environmental Science. They are currently listening to the album “Blue Rev” by Alvvays and would like to recommend the webcomic/animation “Theratpy” (Tumblr and YouTube). They are from Massachusetts; they enjoy plant identification and thrifting!
