Illustration by Ashley Yung
She asks me how much it hurts and I tell her I’m fine.
The sting of the needle is a bite like an old friend,
a mouthful of teeth secured to the skin under
my left shoulder blade. Fading into the background,
the hum of a gun like a gramophone, singing along
to the tune of permanence. I’m an auditorium,
my body a performance, and the patrons in the front row
like the singing just fine but are waiting for me to dance.
The curtains roll open and instead of a stage it’s a sink,
many sinks, the basins and ranges of the Mojave, contoured
in alternating altitudes like the musculature across my back.
I sank my feet into the sand and gusts blew the dunes over me
like a blanket, a cantata of transience chanted out
under their breaths. Brittlebush blossoms turned their faces
to the sun, their resin dripping like honey onto the shade of my neck.
I just want to be decorated in flowers, ambulatory ink seeping
into the vinyl of my skin, I want wandering lines that remain dark
through dust storms, I want you to be a mapmaker tracing the
topography of my spine and I want to be holy so please
make me a cathedral, my windows honeycombed with color,
stifled storm-light diffusing across the dome. You see, when it rains
particularly heavily during the southern California winter,
wildflowers drink up the downpour like an oasis. Come springtime,
poppies wash over the hillsides and reclaim the land, paint
the muscled back of the coastline in the colors of precolonial
consciousness, every lakeside and mountaintop surface blistering
in floral brights. But the curtains are closing, and I’m back in the chair,
my body pressed open like a butterfly in a frame, kowtowing in front of
an artist with her needles in my back, and we’ve returned to the singing,
a hymn held out over a lightless auditorium or a lament echoing
throughout the chapel of my ribcage. The enormity of my skeleton
scares me, and the audience is still waiting for me to dance,
to go home to the hillsides and pray for forgiveness, to kneel
among the citrine and the amethyst and beg for reversal,
singing my own name so quietly as if winding back a clock,
oh dear Lord, won’t you give me back an empty stage
or an uncarved wall, and we can start again, let me prove to you
I’m capable of bowing without wanting something in return.
But no, I’m awake in the thoughtless rain, and that was a dream
that didn’t happen. I went home to the hillsides and
planted trees that could not grow, for this was a desert,
not the redwoods, the land was already tired of nurturing life
that didn’t belong, and the wildflowers faded back into the dirt
by June. I went home to the hillsides and all I could hear was
a voice asking me how much it hurt, the performance of my body,
which has remained so resolutely still in this chair despite
my best attempts to breathe, but the sting of the needle is
temporary, just another dream that hasn’t quite ended. Back home
my mother hikes up a mountainside blanketed by blue-eyed grass
and worries about permanence, picks up premonitions of regret
before we even have a chance to feel them. My mother has always
feared this, the topographic map that my body has become. She will
wonder what the wasteland between my shoulder blades looks like
when I am older. Consider it, I will tell her, a superbloom.
Vanessa Yang (she/her) is a junior at Barnard majoring in biochemistry. She enjoys driving next to the beach, taking pictures of the sky, and talking about California. You can find her on Instagram @vanessayyang.