Karen Zhou

{ circular breathing }

I’ve lost my pace. The one that raced in the nebular wild white,

is it still fresh?

 

find those tattooed tulips encased in mud. in the warmth of solitude their sweets
reduce. Unread.

It’s nothing incriminating, simple observations on

how

our rows of xs lined up in neon hues
wish the room would grow

too small for words.

 

so we lay flled, healing ophelias raised on the moon, raving

“it’s tedious work, rivalling the dead,” Because she is soon, and we make her still and we make
sure – never to question whether she was better off blind, or maybe too invisible.

I hate to look and see a classic: all that

tried to ft globe by globe, never settling

another unforgivable

 

rash

because we left her whole at the transept for
the impossibility of brûléed snow

Karen Zhou relocated to Canada in her teens. Her poetry has been published in Hart House Literary Review, Echolocation, and Trinity Review. She served as the editor-in-chief of The Window magazine at the University of Toronto and is the current business manager of The Varsity, Canada’s largest university newspaper.
This entry was posted in Poetry and tagged by Posit Editor. Bookmark the permalink.

About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.