Gone Lawn
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Gone Lawn 49
flower moon, 2023

Featured artwork, Shift VI, by Catherine Skinner

new works

Emily Liu

rainbows and rainbows and rainbows shining across the universe


not that unusual an occurrence to wake up and wonder about my sanity but this particular morning opening my eyes to diamonds of morning white slivering between the curtains i understood it to be the light of the universe itself (NOT a metaphor) beaming straight into my skull
my head is cracked, clear as that, CONFIRMED, else i wouldn’t see the fractals creeping across my eyeballs, traveling down and estranging my body along skeletal lines ⁠— tectonics are global ⁠— of the corpse; of the continent ⁠— of a system in continuous and constant collapse ⁠— as the chaos of the expanding universe accumulates, and as my skull is CONFIRMED fractured, the entropy enters necessarily, my matter (joyfully immaterial!!!) seeps out.
this IS a kind of glee.
one i didn’t expect, claiming a broken leak of a thing. but isn’t it a relief (not the art kind), to have the answer to why one has always felt so...
paper thin...
— because one really is to the watchers in 4D who fold us into far more than cranes creasing
proteins to prions                 marvels of engineering
  we will never possess just think
of Humpty Dumpty, sad single parenthetical beneath their eyes, raw insides spilling gold over the plain brick road⁠⁠ just think
of Zhuangzi reporting the death of poor blobby Hundun1, how much noise the drill must have made, how those seven gaping, oozing holes must have hurt. to craft one proper leaky human
      or would it have been a silent affair?
      (not enough holes? ⁠— you can always trepan yourself for more)
spotted my crystal skull on display at the garage sale. at its price not a bad deal, just don’t pick it up and jerk it in a nod. otherwise jangle of clinking shards, other odds and ends, looping lines of janky code:

when i wake up i recite the basic facts of me
to myself. condensed to a list i am she,
who is there, who is doing such and is some
age. i am not sure if you took those things
away from me that very much would change.*
when i wake up i recite the basic facts of me
to myself. condensed to a list i am she,
who is there, who is doing such and is some
age. i am not sure if you took those things
away from me that very much would change.*
when i wake up i recite the basic facts of me
to myself. condensed to a list i am she,
who is there, who is doing such and is some
age. i am not sure if you took those things
away from me that very much would change.*

*perhaps this will be the year for that —
the year i find out what i am made of,

finally. we accept that nothing is working right
because i’m cracked, cracked, cracked like eggs
we dropped onto the pavement in fifth grade

having failed to entrust them
proper protection. Humpty, i’m sorry⁠ —
you fell for our holes, yielded your most precious protein,
but

too many things too painful. to face
when we will know to stop running

from our hairline fractures, ossified and inexorable
fall through instead

let your gold spill out

dive                           into

blind
light


...


Spalko, skull in palms, tried and failed
after Hamlet, me in my head watches the curtains, me in bed
with my crystal ball head in my palms, i sing watch
the crystal raindrops fall, flicking my eyes to catch the rainbows
they throw wavering onto the walls⁠—

(beyond the drapery, a work which would occupy me for the rest of my existence,
the only price paid an ostensible descent into madness, alone knowing the truth,)

inspecting the spaghetti pale pink pulsing
porous to the elements i am blessed to possess⁠
how else could the light flow
into me from the shining event horizon,
trillions of twinkling mythologies
and beasts and deities,

or maybe the glow of a video game console.
turn the skull in your palm and ask whether you ought to
be or not to be

and admire the way the pinpoints dance
color over the transversable curtains

separating maybe the compartments of changing rooms
rising one by one on the stretching horizon

of the department store
of the crucible universe

which melts us as gold
so we seep out mad as rainbows.


1混沌


Emily O Liu is a San Diego native teaching English in Taiwan. Her poems appear in Red Ogre Review and Poetry Lab Shanghai. She loves fantasy, languages, and wearing colors.