ALENA ZENG

Poetry | BASIS Independent Silicon Valley, San Jose, CA

Postcard with Burning Sky

A–––, you haven’t been back to California in a while so here’s a memory from the summer: evening & the sun turns over & pollution or smoke or something else alights the sky in orange & red, clouds streaming against the horizon. Wildfire season—maybe in another city there's a real emergency, a fire carving through a highway—but here everything is calm, here fire is just another color soaking into a sky outlined in chalk & here people fold themselves inside, air conditioning working over their skin, to watch through a window. Their hands stilled with remembering. The chapped asphalt seethes even at night, & the enveloping, ripe heat burns clean through the world like a bullet: everything muffled & trembling in its wake. There are only ever a few stars in the deepening blue sky, but I wanted to tell you the flowers on our windowsill still expand as if stretching to stargaze for the first time. & the dry, goldenrod moon shifts above the imprints of people left behind in the grass. For the orange pooling of streetlamps on sidewalks, the tiny insects whirling in each band of light, suspended in their own tiny worlds—this endless burning of our unmoving, endless days & night strolls & quiet restlessness, where a halo of heat hangs static over our heads under the guise of an unwrapped, brilliant sky—come back.

open water

after Chopin’s Étude Op. 25, No. 12 — “Ocean”

étude named for its turbulence and velocity, its unbridled crests. C minor: a gasping for breath. unblinking and cold, we brace for its finality—

seascape of black and white keys, all jagged brightness

making and unmaking.

the highest notes retreat

like birds atop the accelerating storm,

and at night we listen

to the odd resonance of backwash and falling apart—our own wreckage and driftwood desolation bleeding into the water.

the sky

slashed open. we are

so beautiful in the loud, brief glare

of sudden light.

look at the toss

and turn, arpeggios buoyed up in torrents, the bare contour

of the right hand— the rest of the world fractured and pulsating

to the echo of thunder, gunshots.

this country’s silhouette blurred in rain. all the reverberations and

rhythm of waves

splitting along the shore. we refuse

to settle. tell me someday

we’ll find our way to the other

side of this senseless horizon. we are

so human in our rawness. tell me about the unquietly

tragic production of sound. tell me

we are both storm and the ocean it breaks upon.