CLAIRE ZHOU
A Sonnet for My Moon Baby
This poem came at an interesting time in my life. I was eating hotpot at Hai Di Lao when I noticed seaweed floating on top of the soup, and that’s when the idea of “baby” struck me: a common word people use without really considering how many meanings resound around the term. I wanted to incorporate that into a poem somehow, which is how this particular poem was born.
It starts in the pool & ends in your death. In the water,
you are translucent as a gill. There is a moon in the sky,
which means there is a person. A suckling light.
A baby, hanging from a starred noose, face blacked out, so white
it hurts. This baby is the product of a late-night fuck,
and it is dead, it is the type that gets aborted, it is the type.
It is your type. It does not get a name. It gets a shape: a comma
in your bed. It gets a man. It gets your man, who is not dead
yet. Your hair like seaweed in the blue. Your man says baby,
get out of the water, it’s cold. He says, baby, baby, baby.
Dead. Baby, come here. Baby, do you love me? The lemon croon
of a child’s lullaby. A filament of a baby’s first cry in your stomach,
cord tracing the surface. You drink water like wine,
pulse hardening to a full stop. Baby, all drowned in the sunrise.
Claire Zhou is a student currently residing in Suzhou, China. She enjoys hip-hop and badminton in her free time.
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