by Allison Zhang

 

I entered with nothing but thirst.
The sand offered no room.

At the checkpoint, a man
with silver eyelids asked for my name.

I gave him three. He swallowed them whole.
Said I could earn one back by walking.

The sky wrote its riddles
in a language I almost remembered.

Birds flew—wings slicing sideways,
eyes stitched shut.

I passed a woman grinding glass
into salt. Her wrists bandaged in gold.

She asked what I came to trade.
I didn’t know what I had left.

The trees whispered
what I should not have known.

I stepped into shadow,
grew taller. Stepped out—

the world no longer fit me. The sun
doesn’t set here, only flickers.

A child held out fruit,
red seeping through her fingers.

She laughed and turned into smoke.
Not all lessons come clean.

At the river, I knelt to drink—
the water whispered a name

I hadn’t spoken in years.
It was no longer mine.

Somewhere behind me, the city folds
like a lung shot through. I don’t look back.

That’s the rule.
Keep walking. Even when

the road turns to teeth.

 

 

 

---

Allison Zhang is a poet and writer based in Los Angeles. An immigrant and bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about inheritance, memory, and the quiet ruptures of daily life. She was a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, and her work appears or is forthcoming in The Baltimore Review, ONE ART, Sky Island Journal, and others. Allison can be found on Instagram.