Lizzy Ke Polishan
peels. My father was a hoe and my mother was
a rake. My brother,
a fishbone; my sister, a crushed egg.
I loved the dirt so much I turned it into my shoes.
I loved the grass so much I bent a drop of dew into a diamond
ring I used to lasso a blade. Someone called me a golf
club and bent me over a knee. Someone called me
sugar and crushed me into a glass of lemonade. Will I become
a tree if someone ate most of my body? I was not
sure where those sparrows scattered my seeds. I was not sure
where my brother learned to widen the space between his ribs.
The grass resized my shoes, yee-haw! My sister turned a dewdrop
into a ring of light. You called it a ring light. I called you, before you hardened
and dried. It was too dark for me to catch your name.
Lizzy Ke Polishan’s recent poems appear in or are forthcoming from Waxwing, Gulf Coast, Passages North, Poet Lore, Epiphany, EPOCH, RHINO, Salt Hill, Black Warrior Review, and others. She is the current Managing Editor of River & South Review, a poetry reader for Psaltery & Lyre, and the author of the poetry collection A Little Book of Blooms (2020). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.