RUNWAY

At the airport gate,
the girl had a body
like a wire hanger, a spindly
metal rod.  She said: "I've been
twisted and reshaped one too many times."
Her mouth opened
and closed.  Her arms were
spilling over the plastic armrests
of the chair, legs stretched out in front, bent
at awkward angles. 

She flew
to new places, and left
behind a tail of photographs
that might be printed
in a magazine someday, lost
somewhere between two perfume samples
and a full-page ad for sleep medication.
She said she liked to go barefoot:
"I need to know the ground is
still there." 

When she walked away, it was down a path that was meant for planes.

THE LOST ELEMENT

The first time I saw him, he was standing,                                                    
rail-thin figure bent over the drinking fountain outside 7th grade science.
Tall, limbs straight and narrow like map pencils in a plastic tub,
held together and shrouded in clothing that never quite fit.
Everything that year was an experiment—
The black marker lines that bled into rainbows on paper
when dipped into water, narrow tubes of glass that we held in flames
until they became malleable, and bent in our hands,
the stick figures I drew in the margins of his lab sheets
until I heard the hut-hut-hut of his quiet laughter.
In our workbooks, I colored the Noble Gases on the Periodic Table
to match the gray-green of his eyes. The rigid squares echoed
his body, straight edges and sharp corners. 

The first time I fell in love, he was sitting,
a lanky form at rest on the front porch steps.
That summer, the cartons of strawberry ice cream
in my freezer multiplied, melted when I left them
open on the kitchen table. Each time he said he’d eaten
at home, he wasn’t hungry, the migraines were worse,
he wasn’t in the mood, but maybe next time. Ha!
His laugh became large and hollow; his former self rattled inside.
All those years: hypotheses and predictions and tests
that like plants seemed to wither and fail. I ate his leftovers.
My body ballooned out as his began to float away.                                

The first time I watched someone die, he was lying,
a skeleton in my arms, the ghostly impression on a hospital mattress.
My fingers traveled the well-worn path along his arm, his skin,
across the forest and tangled roots of his green and violet veins.
Like the folded-up map in the glove compartment of my car,
every mangled line brought me to the same unavoidable destination.
At night, I ran away, following the lines of the hospital floor
made by its black-and-white checkered squares. Elements had
fixed masses and squares to call home, their physical properties
unchanged for centuries. Dark tiles turned to liquid
and spread across the white canvas that remained, 

revealing hidden colors.

THE TAPEWORM (REPRISE)

clarity is a microscope slide
the organism magnified 8x
feverish and hands shaking
white powder Tylenol tablets
residue on less-than-white teeth
shaking tablets onto wrinkled lifelines
iPod hands feverish
teeth magnified and shaking
bipolar Tylenol tablets
white powder on less-than-white teeth
lifeline residue wrinkled 8x
Youtube shaking on bipolar iPod

“you’re getting on my nerves!” the teacher says
her fingers dripping yellow yarn
mapping the carpet in a trail of my body 

yo-yo tape roll stuck on pause
a microscope slide is clarity
the organism feverish in my hand

Author’s Biography

Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the Etchings Press novella prize and is now available to purchase at https://susanllin.wordpress.com, where you can also find more of her published work.