bathtub elegy

By: Lauren Zhu

Art by: Kaitlyn Anderson

sweat sticky,

untangle my 

soap slickened hair

with your ghost fingers

the water ripples around 

your skin, arcing in the 

memory of your shape,

i lean myself against you

in an effort to stay back, 

gives of your smooth 

and sinking arms.

all of our

conversations 

lead to the past, scrub my back with calluses 

knit around your knuckles like a glove, 

listless and unlistening in your wrestling

end in an act of sculpture, 

we mold our plush bodies together, 

teach me the lingering 

difference between poetic

fodder and empty bitterness, 

your willful forgetting.

closure and promised 

contentment, 

bounds of this doubtful prelude,

longing for you,

mother who has 

left, mother that i've left

long gone

my last light lover

as the water cools

this little heat

of our close bodies, 

our sleepless memorials,

the ghosts of these last 

breaths passed between 

the base of our bellies  

This poem takes shape in a contrapuntal, a poetic form in which multiple poems are twisted together. The name is reminiscent of the musical “counterpoint,” where multiple independent melodies weave together, no single melody more powerful than another. A contrapuntal is a counterpoint of poems, where the piece can be read straight across, in columns, or in any way the eye wanders.