Some evenings, when you hold my hand in the dark
I dream of this house as a wound that never closes.
In the summer he left me a silver key, slipped into my dress
wrestling a cursed blessing. I trusted him, the way
wildflowers trust the rain during typhoon season:
even drowning, I was to open my mouth

to his. This was marriage, an eroded mouth
with vows dried on the tongue like clay, darkened
to river silt. You miss them less & less as the seasons
drift away. On nights he kissed me, I closed
my lips & licked the salt afterward the way
my father groomed us daughters to be: dolls dressed-

up in silvered silence. In my wedding white dress
I was less doll than lamb muzzled at the mouth.
The ruby red choker he gifted me crawled halfway
down my neck, an omen glistening—dark
& hopeless as any beautiful thing close
to him. If only my father let the banquet season

pass like poems, like little metaphors, seasoned
to die. Instead, I circled the castle addressing
the empty echo chambers, the walls drawing closer
until the light could no longer touch its mouth
to mine. As a girl, my father insisted there is no darkness
but ignorance. At the door, the key quivered, then made way

for me. My slippers, stained. The blood, trailing all the way
home. Then, his spiced, cinder breath. His wives, shrouded in season
by lilies tall as the castles that bound them, pollinating the dark.
Whenever my sisters ask for a sketch, I wring the dresses
from memory first: unspindling into pearled lace, mouthless
faces flickering in caged lanterns, close-

up. My sisters held me as they would a closed
cradle. I carry our daughters the same way.
You have always wondered how their mouths
mirrored mine: crescent-mooned, bearing a season
of secrets as they would fruit—innocent & undressed.
I am no stranger to this warmth. Even as another dark

winter closes its eyes, I name them after the kinder seasons.
This way, though there is no happily ever after dressing
the past, they will sleep, soft-mouthed, after dark.

—Serrina Zou

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