perhappened mag
issue 7: SNOWFALL
daughter discovers snow
in all the wrong ways
NAOMI LING
On her deathbed, my grandmother says
the streets of Guangzhou have never
melted snow. Wait. Don’t tell
me that these small miracles are rare.
I don’t want to be the end
of a gun, a punchline, for the sky to
speak for us in its love language.
So instead, I search for snow in all of the
past versions of myself: a lover,
a bartender, a dreamer on a balcony.
So many synonyms for death.
Rewind, and my grandmother braids my
hair like snow: a slow, silvery thread
against my spine. I’m ready to become
every angel. Outside my apartment
window, the neighborhood boys
chase girls who look like snow:
all wispy and translucent and falling.
Here is how to die slowly:
I move out of the apartment, the city.
My grandmother stays.
I catch real snow in my mouth
for the first time, against a
Manhattan skyline. I don’t know how
to braid my hair: I guess I never
learned how. I grow tired of snow,
yearn for heat staggering out of
pavement back in Guangzhou.
Yearn for the boys who catch
drifting girls in the backs of alleys. My
grandmother agrees, or at least
I imagine. Over oceans, she closes her
mouth for good, closes it to
the exit-wound sky. When she
dies, I ship snow over oceans
and imagine it seeping from the
FedEx package and
into the Guangzhou streets.
I imagine it claiming her
body for its own: a small, uninhabited
angel.
the streets of Guangzhou have never
melted snow. Wait. Don’t tell
me that these small miracles are rare.
I don’t want to be the end
of a gun, a punchline, for the sky to
speak for us in its love language.
So instead, I search for snow in all of the
past versions of myself: a lover,
a bartender, a dreamer on a balcony.
So many synonyms for death.
Rewind, and my grandmother braids my
hair like snow: a slow, silvery thread
against my spine. I’m ready to become
every angel. Outside my apartment
window, the neighborhood boys
chase girls who look like snow:
all wispy and translucent and falling.
Here is how to die slowly:
I move out of the apartment, the city.
My grandmother stays.
I catch real snow in my mouth
for the first time, against a
Manhattan skyline. I don’t know how
to braid my hair: I guess I never
learned how. I grow tired of snow,
yearn for heat staggering out of
pavement back in Guangzhou.
Yearn for the boys who catch
drifting girls in the backs of alleys. My
grandmother agrees, or at least
I imagine. Over oceans, she closes her
mouth for good, closes it to
the exit-wound sky. When she
dies, I ship snow over oceans
and imagine it seeping from the
FedEx package and
into the Guangzhou streets.
I imagine it claiming her
body for its own: a small, uninhabited
angel.
Naomi Ling is a Sino-American student on the East Coast, USA. The founding EIC of gossamer lit, she edits for Aurora Review and reads for Pollux Journal, among others. Her works have been recognized nationally by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and Top Ten Poetry and appear in Eunoia Review, perhappened, Kissing Dynamite, and elsewhere. She tweets unprofessionally @naomilingwrites.