Sophie
We sit and wait for
a picture that is taking
its time to load. Our whole summer
shed like blood. The air was silked with cicadas
and all the almost adults were
trembling in the hands to become someone important.
I thought of how I could take my new license
and drive straight across my life’s small, shiny street.
Miss you.
Do you see me at our usual table? We planned
out new memories in tickets we’d never end up buying.
My body was a train seat,
crafted to hide the ugly. You rubbed
the right spots and my pain seeded out.
Grew into memory. Light leaks
against the lines of my body. I develop
the roll of film you lent me and everything
is crooked and misshapen, magenta teeth
sabotaging the sheets. My crimes cataloged
on silver paper, no room for error. You show
me the 4×5 film you developed last week,
edges smudged with black fingerprints. You
tell me how many times you’ve made the same
mistake. I hope I was your best one.
I drive and drive
until light becomes a metric of distance. We pour drinks into dresses
and when I walk out of heaven it is already August.
The future left unthought of like a bouquet in a kitchen.
That summer I stopped shaving the skin
off my lips and took you thrifting in windowless
boutiques. You slip into a New Yorker’s denim
jacket with an attitude about authentic sushi. I
come out of the dressing room in an overexposed silky number
that screams alcoholic in denial. You don’t quite
understand what a poem means so I write you
into this one.
You tell me I’m enough but never
enough times for me to believe you. You say
you’ll keep trying. Here’s how I know you’re lying.
How the sun stops before your feet. How I told you
you could leave and you did. We can talk
trauma and your voice eclipses mine. And in honor
of the poem, you claim that I am not the speaker
and insist that someone else is speaking in my
place. If I try to take it back, you’ll burn
the film up and I’ll be too late. Sometimes,
I believe I can still hurt you, so I circle you like
an animal who doesn’t know her cage is
only as wide as your last mistake.
Mini-interview with Sherice Kong
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
SK: Attending YoungArts. Prior to that, all my writing was read by my eyes only until I could no longer tell if something was the most beautiful thing I had ever written or a clumsy imitation of it. Other poets seemed like they had blossomed out of some secretive forest of talent that I never knew about. It was only until meeting other young artists that I realized how much joy there was in sharing my writing with real people who had so many varied perspectives. We wrote about things that others had never experienced, but we were somehow able to deeply connect to each other over the course of one week. That’s what I try to strive for in my writing: everyone’s stories are different but our feelings rarely differ.
HFR: What are you reading?
SK: Short story anthologies.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Sophie”?
SK: The first iteration of this poem was written over two years ago and was stagnant until I recently decided to revise it. In my teenage years, I would often spend three hours writing a single poem in one sitting only to never edit it. “Sophie” was written when I was best friends with someone who is no longer so. For years, I kept the poem the same and only came back to the document to remind me of our friendship. The poem originally ended on a neat little line about grocery shopping and laundry. But the feelings in that poem were not the truth; in reality, our friendship burned bright but itself out. After I revised the poem to reflect how I really felt, it finally felt complete. To me, this poem embodies the idea that a poem might not be true, but it must tell a truth.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
SK: Figuring out my career. It’ll probably take a while.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
SK: I’m looking forward to the years that will come.
Sherice Kong’s work is published in Gasher Journal, Kissing Dynamite, and the Lumiere Review. Her writing has also been recognized by the Scholastic Awards and the Adroit Prizes, and she is a 2023 YoungArts Winner in Creative Nonfiction. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions 2023. Currently, she studies physics and math at Penn.
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Heavy Feather Review 