STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
CLAIRE MENG
Blazing in backyard grass:
bees drenched in lemon light,
the garden sweet & singing.
Monday. Still sour with summer
sweat, I’m spinning
to a rhythmless tune through
the parched lawn, humming
with flight. Rheumy blue
blurring with fresh-cut green
and glints of silver holding
damp jeans — I’m caught
in the kaleidoscope
of each second. Dizziness
straight to my head,
the aftertaste of honey-
gilded hawthorne berries,
stinging and sweet, always
best served cold. Inside
the house: blankets
like boulders in tired
disguise, and the thick
stench of exhaustion — but
at least while the world’s still
in motion, perfection sleeps in
the chemical softness
of my shirt, warming
my chest with the promise
of more clean laundry,
slow afternoons.
june muffles my head in styrofoam sweetness.
sticky leather couches cling to my thighs, stray
street cats and the lull of the ocean wiping
my footprints through the kitchen into silence. at night:
the hsshh hiss and swell of seawater spitting white
foam against porous rock. rollerblades sliding
along granite tiles, forward and faster, lurching
sense of the wrong gravity, the wrong
gravity pulling me sideways toward the ocean’s
arms. In constant freefall, my loose limbs
and tangled tongues twisting in the rolling
waves, rocking in our own unscalable key; this skin-
smudged color you can’t name blading across
unlabeled shapes; this sinking stomach sealed with
cellophane, borrowed from another sleepless summer—
i brought back this foreign season’s songs in salt-
stained suitcases and my name, too, my mother’s
misconception—another country’s satellite
trained on my body, my real self, just a girl
singing in a seawoman’s shanty—my real self,
ramrod straight at the pool’s edge as my classmates
timber—my real self is the eye
of the needle in syrup-thick symphony, swimming
across this side of the Pacific to reach a blade
of truth. which is to say: i am
Claire Meng is a Seattle-based student poet and an alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop. Her work can be found in Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal @ Washington College and wildness. When she’s not absorbed in a book, you can find her playing the flute or creating 30-minute playlists.
