ON THE GREEN LINE, A VIOLINIST STRIKES
ALM No.68, September 2024
POETRY
on the green line, a violinist strikes
a gee-sharp. i lower my book, Oliviera’s Dayspring, dog
ear the wilted page. here, the spruce-plucker pauses, looks
at me as though i am something predictable, that somehow, through
that rib, neck and scroll, he knows my secret: i am not all that
complex – i can see right through you, girl, his chord seems
to whittle. and i can’t help but think that he is right. lately,
my scenarios are ugly existentials: brane universes and whom
they may concern, entanglements and thousand-kilometre
distances and taut, gingham ribbons. small. i say. think small. at
zaftig’s deli, i eat the best reuben of my life. except
for the sauerkraut, which always manages to catch like death
midbite. yesterday, i am kissing a boy who said he loves
me. it feels like cheating a hole-in-one, tipping the pocked ball
using my breath down the waterfall through the flimsy castle
i shuffle on the trolley, clutching the chrysanthemums for my mother
and laughing at the absurdity of the word cry-sahn-thee-mum,
which really should not exist. in my head i recite fragile
equilibriums of dihydrogen and carbon monoxide and potaseeum
dichromate. if this violinist were to ask me how i’m feeling,
though, i would not give him the long version.
self-portrait of a brutally soft girl
do you realise Godhood is just like Girlhood? an ugly, divine
rage / not marred by bloody, pray-torn knees, but tokens of her age / God
lies in the midst of her lacquered heart. She will not fracture against /
gentle Hell. / She will not beg to be diluted, no bastard plea will breathe
into existence: what is a girl but a prelude to shattering? / true: that we’re a sad,
secret kind of dying, / that there is something female about being dead1 /
writhing, wondering, weakening of / good daughters blamed for their skin
& their touch / solace only in the night woven in their mothers’ hands /
watch & burn as your silence / seeds into this
new
light.
EmmaRose Zilla is a high school junior from Boston, Massachusetts – though she originally hails from the cosmopolitan city of Hong Kong. She loves free-verse poetry, and her work has been recognised by the Kenyon Young Writers Program and the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards. In her free time when she's not writing, she's probably swimming, playing the piano, or haunting her local bookstore.
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