"The Love that Remains" by Fiona Hsu
Will I Ever See You Again by Ginna Luck
I found a strange animal. I found it wounded in the grass. I brought it home. I let it sleep in my
bed on my pillow. I don’t like a thing to be lonely. I fed it from my hand. I held its tiny black
mouth up to my ear. I listened to its magnetic apparatus. I listened all day, all night. I loosened
up its sounds with my tongue. I sanded its belly smooth enough to fit in its wires. I welcomed its
whirlwind under my covers. The invisible and also the rubble (which seemed to be a symptom of
the hard weather). It had the most beautiful eyes. Eyes like the surface of the ocean, huge and
crashing, almost white. The most scoured and icy of eyes. And no, no I was not afraid. Even as
its fur smoked off its translucent, spiny legs. Even as I could see its skeleton sliver out from its
skin like a pothole, I called it onto my flesh. It crawled up my arm and clung to my hair. It
slipped, without sound, backward into my chest and stayed for years within my channels. I could
write my name but that was all. It moved and I moved. It thought and I said: all things will be
heavy, and they were. I heard them stomping even in my sleep. A hissing pollution filled my
hands. Every noise stung a different ghost or a clump of hair or something in place of the animal
I had taken into my body - its claws slowly pulling out, its startled, dark stump escaping. Its
black tongue clicked into never. Even my breathing left a cold space you couldn’t even open.
You didn’t even try. It wasn’t good to slip into.
bed on my pillow. I don’t like a thing to be lonely. I fed it from my hand. I held its tiny black
mouth up to my ear. I listened to its magnetic apparatus. I listened all day, all night. I loosened
up its sounds with my tongue. I sanded its belly smooth enough to fit in its wires. I welcomed its
whirlwind under my covers. The invisible and also the rubble (which seemed to be a symptom of
the hard weather). It had the most beautiful eyes. Eyes like the surface of the ocean, huge and
crashing, almost white. The most scoured and icy of eyes. And no, no I was not afraid. Even as
its fur smoked off its translucent, spiny legs. Even as I could see its skeleton sliver out from its
skin like a pothole, I called it onto my flesh. It crawled up my arm and clung to my hair. It
slipped, without sound, backward into my chest and stayed for years within my channels. I could
write my name but that was all. It moved and I moved. It thought and I said: all things will be
heavy, and they were. I heard them stomping even in my sleep. A hissing pollution filled my
hands. Every noise stung a different ghost or a clump of hair or something in place of the animal
I had taken into my body - its claws slowly pulling out, its startled, dark stump escaping. Its
black tongue clicked into never. Even my breathing left a cold space you couldn’t even open.
You didn’t even try. It wasn’t good to slip into.
Ginna Luck's work can be read in Radar Poetry, Gone Lawn, decomP, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, Bodega, Rust + Moth, Leveler Poetry and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has an MFA from Goddard College. She currently lives in Seattle.
Fiona Hsu was born in February of 2001 in Orange County, California. She has won first place in Yorba Linda Women’s Club art competition in 2019 with recognition from Congress, Senate, and Assembly, and she is a National Silver Medalist of Scholastic Art and Writing Awards 2019. Fiona is currently studying at UCLA as an undergraduate studio art major. Her works capture the aspects of beauty within woeful and melancholic definitions that narrate quaint and odd stories, in which she hopes her art serves as rusty mirrors for her audience—reflecting and reminding them of a quality and/or memory from the past.
Fiona’s works can be found on her website and her instagram page.
Fiona’s works can be found on her website and her instagram page.
