Poetry By Sharon Zhang

         ​Nicholas_T CC




Becoming a better girl

1. By which I mean less wants, so

             No more lashings in dawn light.
             The rain coughs phlegm down the
             gutters, skittering your skin with layers
             Of petroleum. How the distance
             Between the clouds and the future
             Is impossibly large. How you tried to
             See your next lover, but only saw 
             more blue.

1. By which I mean loving yourself.

             To life, breasts upturned and bitten,
             Caught and hung upon hook hands.

1. Because you want to be 

             a hospital, to let the hungry inside you and eat
             You up whole, to pronounce the living
             dead. Because you want to thrash yourself alive:
             To thrash yourself out of your 
             mother.

1. Imagine there’s an arrow, and it’s

             Shooting toward you, and so you laugh,
             And it burrows into your wrist, and you’re 
             Still laughing, hand flattened out into
             An envelope with a name on it. Dawn is 
             crackling on the radio, your feet are stuttering
             A little song; nothing else to do, love. 

1. You wanted to put back a piece of

             Yourself where it didn’t belong. 
             And you wanted it badly, sainting 
             your body until you were sour. This
             was so you could let your skin roam,
             deify, another birth, zipping it all
             Back up, baby: we know that’s what you
             need.

1. I couldn’t quite figure out martyrdom; not 

             the silence at the very end, not the static of a
             Body as it falls off a highway. I sirened myself
             Instead, the country’s very best whore. You’ve
             Got to try me. You’ve got to see what I’m
             Good for.

​

Sharon Zhang is an Asian-Australian, Melbourne-based poet and author. Her work has been recognised by Paper Crane Journal, Antithesis Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a mentee at Ellipsis Writing and an editor at Polyphony Lit. Outside of writing, she enjoys collecting CDs, scrolling endlessly on her phone, and thinking about Deleuze a touch more than that which is necessary. She is the poet laureate of pretentiousness and using the word “body” when any other noun would work instead. Skin. Limbs. Humanness. Tablecloth.

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