Allison Wu 

at the fish market, ama tells me she cannot remember

the last time there was room to forget. blood
and expectorated sea water tangle in ice, chasing
all the gaps in between. i’ve learned everything is eventually consumed
at the mouth of the river, because what is memory if not taken
by a greater body, tumbled at the lip of a wave,
skinned airless. the sky is a gill domed
over this still life which is really just half an inheritance.
ama is lodged in the spine of vendor stalls,
her pupils gelatinous, stumbling in empty, so salt sick
as the evening flees. there is no cracked seabed
to grieve or first waters to yearn, only light leaking
across scratched film. she takes me for all
that i can offer, that is to say, all which she
cannot recall. four damp bills exchanged
for a corpse. a transaction is nothing
if not an exhibition of all things stolen. the snapper’s scream

is red silent on the other side of the plastic. a blow to the head
is all it takes. somehow to call something brain dead
is to say that it is painless. ama squints at me,
past me, leaves me somewhere between the buckets of cuttlefish
and a drifting sense of knowing spun thin as sugar floss
by the hands of time. at home, i find her cradling the fish
with a gentleness she once cleaved into my cheek,
now another floodplain in muscle memory. i cannot escape her
unbroken, her mouth foaming with silt rather than static.
she pummels milky flesh, dredges it bare in oil, spark
leaping off scale, tells me to open wide and for a second
i wonder if she remembers but i’ve only mistaken
reflex for intention. i’m opening and i can see
the brain spike at the crest of her hair. i’m opening and i can taste
the torrents of salt water carving my throat foreign. 

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Allison Wu is a writer from New York. Her work has appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, West Trestle Review and elsewhere. She has been recognized by Youngarts, Princeton University and more.