heat lighting triptych

i.
i suck myself from the spine of your collar stay, plastic welts
raised from my teeth. the bone between knuckle and wrist.

i reach at a cemetery behind your neck. you flinch. ask me
what i think about heat lightning and i will paw the air

between your fingers–

on the phone with my ex, you say, she might take this badly,
but. your friends laugh the bus into a speed bump so i chew

my teeth into a honeycomb, give you one earbud, and croon
until my lips bleed,                             all at the same time.

ii.
i cut my fist with my tongue, hope your mouth will spring back
from my fingers. either i accidentally bite my lip, or my hand

is a knife. you pick.

in nine hours we never pass a cemetery, but i point at your collar
and you think i want to touch             your throat. you,

who surrendered yourself to christ, love raw beef,
hate the rich. i say                   my ex once suggested

i fuck myself with a toothbrush. i took it like an olive branch.
anyway.

i don’t remember crying, but i know you wiped away my tear,
pointed at the moon.

iii.
since i got home i have been trying to tear out everything
that was never there–          retainers, earrings, tampons.

i forget how you took out your collar stay,
our backs cracking at the same time. how

i laughed         as you whispered of gardens
scorched by lightning, your teeth sharpened

by my neck.                      anyway,

my pen scrapes your earwax from my headphones.
i am sick of noise and this endless devouring–

how you burn anything round to a moon.

Ziyi Yan is a young writer from Connecticut and an alum of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio and the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship. Her work is published or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Kissing Dynamite, and others. She is also the editor in chief of the Dawn Review.