Lucy Zhang

Escapism

The escape artist stood in front of a mirror naked
saw only what disgusted
not hands nor eyes nor legs nor waist
nor head nor arms nor neck
but the plain bulge of flesh that tore
into the idealism characteristic of a child or stupid adult
ah, how it would be good to be thin and beautiful
said the escape artist who only knew beauty in those separate realms
visited silently at night.

And the artist felt such shame
dripping down the drab drain
of meaningless thoughts and petty wishes.
This physical body could be written into fantasy
and the mind would still be drifting elsewhere
in a pretty shell
maybe with the ability to fly too.
Still, concern anchored this earthly corpse
better suited to a morgue
sitting at the bottom of the ocean.
The escape artist thought
Ah, how great it would be not to be so grounded

Rusted Swings

Empty blank dead fish-eyed just like the brain
Sitting up there in some swing
Moving back and forth with those gears churning
Rust against rust

So enraptured by the future and the undefined
the yesterdays and todays are left forgotten
the tomorrows a distant speck, not even
It’s far too much for the current pace of swinging
Back and forth, back and forth slowly steadily

Dead metal chipping away
From this ambitious forwardness—it still treks onward
Enclosed within a shell
Like a turtle who finds land to lay its eggs
Half which are dug up by human children on the beach, a quarter which are eaten after hatching
A quarter that might make it to sea.

Forget first
Then stop remembering in the first place
And keep swinging back and forth
So the world might be washed of color.

There’s Nothing Quite Like The Plague

Avoid it like the plague
For before you contract it
You’d surely endure a fascinating collection of symptoms
And then die not too promptly later.
Suffering is important
in the complex decision making process—to avoid or not to avoid..

Creeping (hardly) into the bodies of empty humans
Lost to the malady long before their small minds were aware
It is fierce and ruthless
At least in the literal, grueling physical world

There really is nothing quite like avoiding the plague
Nothing so evocative of paranoia and doubt
of irrational inducing madness to stay tied to life
of the massive influence it can extend from earth to sky
Avoidance becomes an art.

And art is something near universally exalted
as some elite practice, beyond lowly clichés
Like avoiding the plague
in but a metaphorical sense.

But when you see friends
burning each other alive to kill a deathless epidemic,
the muse might be especially inspired
darting from corner to corner while holding its lifeline
hoping to capture a reality in all its metaphorical glory
only to die of fever before putting anything into words.

A Character’s Farewell

Restart the game
Off and on, an easy click
Blood comes showering down
Life minus one
Again.

Bid the character farewell
Farewell
Here’s the reappearance of a fresh
Quite alive little player for round 2.

Farewell
You distastefully tragic soul
Meeting excessively gruesome end by gruesome end
It’s a wonder you remember it all.

Perhaps we all remember with each reboot
And doesn’t that make this little meeting so pretty
With its decorated ornaments of sparkles and blemishes
Farewell

So he says internally with that look of despair
Farewell
Wishing well both ways
Hoping the cost of a reboot isn’t too high this time.

In Response to Albert Camus’s The Stranger

Ah, dear sir, you are far, far too virtuous of a human

neither one who is disgusted by humanity seeking its destruction,

nor one who loves humanity and must bend souls to hell.

I should call you an angel who only knows good since birth

while we humans have the misfortune of choice.

But even an angel would screech in pain

if I plucked its feathered wings from the tendon stitched to its back

if I poked and prodded some knitting needles through its humanoid eyes

if I dragged it down to Lucifer’s abode where it cannot escape decay

they are selfish creatures.

You, however are tethered to the ground

in your fortified palace of thoughts, which does not yield nearly as easily.

It rejects the world’s depravity from seeping through its moat

and you—

if it is rotting

with the comforting and familiar smell of flesh

and rats gnawing a path through

my face that I see molten

sliding off, black on the outside

ugly pink on the inside

so be it, engulf this place in lava.

—have betrayed me in the end

because somehow there is a light, a calm, a reassurance

while I am left laughing so hard I’ve forgotten to die.

The Artist Exchange

“Your eyes, or your hands,” they told him. What would they do, scoop his eyes out like ice cream, leaving empty sockets glaring at nothing? Or amputate his hands with a saw hilariously evocative of a poorly directed horror film?

“Eyes,” he told them. For without his hands, he could nothing. But without his eyes, he could only see nothing, and the lack of sight, he imagined, might turn out to be a good thing. Blind to the world’s ills, to the monstrous beings who shared his form, to the biased colors that dared to warp his visual interpretations—in fact, it sounded quite nice.

Hands, however, were the medium for art, independence, and creation. He exalted his hands like they were some deity, letting them cast a condescending shadow onto the rest of the world’s body for him to mold.

“Two eyes, equivalent exchange for the two eyes of the woman,” they said in a pleasantly monotone voice.

The woman’s eyes had been jewels of an off-brown color, dull and ordinary from afar, but sparkling, moist, lively things up close. The artist that guided his hands had sought them out, lured her in, the butterfly to venus fly trap. In his quaint self narrative that he told in his mind as he performed the act, he had almost called it “stealing”. But it could not have been, for such was the enigma of art, boundless and free form, able to touch any soul with its fervor. The rest of the woman’s body, he reflected, had been useful too.

She had screamed when he had gouged out her eyes with his painting knife, a tedious process that ultimately yielded favorable results. But as his own eyes faded from his sockets, he could only feel a brilliant color, one he had most certainly never seen before—one that he could only ever experience through his mind.

He was ready. His hands were still intact and he could still create. As he heard the voice of a pretty (he assumed) young woman walking past him, the colors engulfed him and his hands itched as he turned around, ready to marry his craving with his new masterpiece.

But all he met was blackness.