the night has not stolen the taste and shape of my grass-drowned flesh. after all, your croaks already drink the air from my lungs until your survival and my death depend on each other, intertwined like the legs of orpheus and eurydice. at least leave my body behind so daisies bloom from the blades of my shoulders. i wonder about you sometimes, you know. why you only appear in the placenta of the night, a spongy byproduct of selene’s dirty deeds. why i roll across the grass in a love letter to the underworld but fall captive to the swell of your bodies instead. the sky dims so quickly. white shattered into blue shattered into darkness, fragility and negative space colluding into a minute of thin-husked fever dream. i wonder why you roll out of the threat of my searching fingers but crawl from my collarbone as i sleep. wonder, do you know selene’s secrets? in some ways we are a romance story: your throaty rasping, my gasps of i would die for you. perhaps you have so long been steeped in the acid of my tears, of the sweat between my underarm and ribs, that you have grown to like the taste. perhaps i melded into the ground not for the dewy grass but for us. for you. for the addiction of not-knowing, of having a lover who warms my body then steals night. my daisy-armored shoulders will caress you like a nursemaid. crickets, oh crickets. tell me that you know who we are.
April Yu is a young writer from New Jersey with an affinity for language, running, and human anatomy. Although she was indeed born in April, her favorite season is winter. Her work appears in The Aurora Journal, Tigers Zine, and Lit. 202, among others. In 2021, she was awarded the annual #1 Flash Fiction Piece on Storybird sitewide. She is a graduate of the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. Visit her on Instagram @aprilblossom, Twitter @aprilgoldflwrs, and at aprilyu.carrd.co.
