The Meridian

The Meridian by Abby Zhang (@abbyz.320)

There was a line I followed from your mouth to the blood to the color of your eyes and I kept walking though my body screamed for stillness though your name kept dragging itself up my throat like it was trying to crawl back to reach you and I let it tear something loose in me because that was the closest I could get to being held again (by you) I do not remember when I stopped trying to leave the door behind me but the air felt thinner every step I took and I didn’t know how to escape you how to escape this line that was both my tether and my torment and still I followed it even though I knew it would never lead me back to you straight through a history that never wanted me (whole, unbroken) I bled across continents for you and rewrote my name in silence to hear the birds call me stranger in every dialect I had buried in my teeth and still I let them sing through me I let the sky unzip my skin like a country unlearning itself and god—my god—there was nothing holy about the way you loved me like a nation loves its soldiers (disposable) and draped in anthem so I became uent in retreat uent in hunger in what a body learns to forget when it’s touched only in silence only in border I stitched your memory into my side with a thread made from the vowels of my mother’s voice and kept whispering your name until I buried myself in the language of leaving and still I followed the line even when it cut me down the middle and I could no longer tell which side was yours and which side I was allowed to keep.

17 year old Abby Zhang lives in Montreal with her family. She writes everything from postcards to poetry to creative nonfiction. She writes poetry like she is running out of time and letters like she’s got nothing but it. She believes in dramatic exits and glitter pens and all things that rhyme.