daughter in the twisting home

Vivian Huang, United States

last summer, the homeowners replaced

their willow tree with the new body

of a daughter. they carry in their palms: a fistful

of crumbling peonies, petals colored with

their blood, cheap & pretty. in this lifetime, they trace

figures like they take the shape of a weeping

carcass, manifesting Daughter over &

over again. a ghost lingering in the back

of their throats, guilt spilling over the rim

of their cracked lips like thinning

blood in a kettle & they are already

replacing her in a nursery home, begging for

hums that resemble fortunes from the fake

altar down the street. but here, somehow, Daughter’s name

is a joke to them. handcrafted from the weltering

womb & blood-swept

veranda. eyes wide as name clots in a puddle

as she grows, stretches into a bodysuit that isn’t

hers. the new fingers are still prodding

into all of her & pressing into heartbeat like she is

newborn again. building caskets for herself

because that is all she knows

from Mother who taught her nothing but how

to kill. knives bare in the attic, blade sheathed

& sharpened: fit for her. perfect for a perfect

daughter. an education means

nothing to a daughter of scammers,

anyway. & still, she learns

to sew bodysuits shaped new, thread

through skin like plastic, only because they are the lines

engraved on her melting back as it ages into

a monster. tender palms wrapped

around the tip

of her tongue like claws & she is falling

apart on the family tree. branches

sweeping the bangs of her forehead, syrup tracing,

melting the plaque of her lungs & traveling far

gone. away from the landlords that can’t

love her.

& away, she doesn’t remember

how to run where

there is no gravity. she is floating instead, waning like

leftover smoke from her

burning body. all because

this is what she was taught in the summer

of her death. sidewalks snapping the rippling bones

of her skeleton & gasoline filling her veins, oxidizing

into saccharine on her tongue. bitter kissing

everywhere, body swollen & morphed as Mother

& Father carve the shit

out of her. her warm wounds, nothing but

a joke. body crackling like shattered porcelain

on this splitting floor. here, the neighbors are useless

homeowners, love grating over soft-skin

bone, fragile & gone. the homeowners

never change, anyway.

Vivian Huang is a young poet from Irvine, California. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Polyphony Lit, The Ice Lolly Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and Princeton University, and she is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Cloudscent Journal.