Yan Zhang

Ars Poetica

I.
I am gasping for air.
I have been to this street. 

This time, my mind is
not steeped in a haze—
you come along.

Look: the road
folds over the edge
of the neighborhood, the domestic

converging with industry’s soot-spun breath.

Five dumpsters, neatly aligned, mist
rotten vegetables into the air, yesterday’s
stir-fry radiating oil from the windows

wafting the first floor. Stacks
of steel piping soften the piles of redbricks
they smashed across the way. Sometimes 

I blink to be sure
we are seeing the same street. When 

a man drags a spitting hose across
A grid of concrete
in front of me, a girl adjusts her ponytail 

in her bike mirror—they pass, touching
shadows. I can feel your presence fraying
the edges of the afternoon. I can’t

turn. You would have to

show me how to turn sunlight
into memory. Instead, you only fog
air onto the back of my neck. You only drift

back to the street once it is quiet— 

a labrador finished yelping
two streets over, a bottle finished
clinking down the lonely slope. 

II.
I tell nobody about the street. 

When I return to the lot—
my haze-lipped mind—
you don’t come along.

Herb tea.
Airpods.
Mosquito repellent. 

Some day: vegetables
gone rotten, grass cold as morning air.
Birds chattering

through the blare of cicadas. Just
within earshot, I wait for you.

III.
People pass. They could ask
what I’m writing, but they don’t.
I want to stop them, say 

This is a poem. Not
the street, but the cloud flowering
into a storm above us, ready 

to wrestle buds from the trees.
Not the thought, but what refuses
to slip into the afternoon—

the same way meaning slips between
one line and the next.

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Yan Zhang is a student currently residing in Hangzhou, China. She enjoys matcha lattes, taking long strolls in her neighborhood, observing the change in the colors of leaves, and thinking.