Iris Lee/李艾诗
  

you didn’t like me anymore, after i told you 
the horses are fake. you used to watch 
their jagged hooves spawn, stretch, and gallop 
across the stone wall for hours. now i force you
to watch TV with me. Oh, P-Man—he really was 
your hero. but the police shot him down like a rabbit 

& he fell like grass. 

i don’t blame you though. sometimes i wish 
my chains didn’t break. Linda would tell you 
i’m still working on my metaphors—but for me, the sun 
was the big, warm stove at Fiorelli’s. i think 
my soul reincarnated into pepperoni pizza that day. 

i felt so human, Lizzy. 

but i’ll never forget the way your eyes hallowed
& fear scraped out the whites like scoops of vanilla. 

then, they taught us 

how to read the hungry caterpillar  and speak rhymes… i guess they don’t 
teach us how to write because we’re not far enough through
our sentences yet. you refuse to learn, either way, so i do 
all the grocery shopping for the new apartment. i also do 
all the talking with Linda. she always says, 
“you can be honest with us, hun, Plato’s dead.” 

& you scream.

so now we don’t mention it. she just shows us cards plastered 
with fruits. i always feel like she’s trying to make us say something 
in particular. like the time her eyes squinted like a squeezed 
orange when i mentioned the small rocks we used to play with. 
we’ve spent our whole lives watching shadows. 

my mind went all dizzy as i remembered the way the rock was 
round like a soccer ball. the way it silenced against
his skull. i’ve never seen grass pulsing 
red like that. i didn’t know a grown man could fall 
so easily. Twitching, like a rabbit. but i knew
but i knew that even if i could fool them, i could never fool you, 
Elizabeth.

Iris Lee/李艾诗 is a poet and artist from Shanghai who loves her cat Lucy very dearly. She is editor-in-chief of her school magazine Zeitgeist and art director of The Dawn Review. Her work in upcoming in The Round. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, binging philosophical YouTube videos, and listening to Lana Del Rey.