PAIRED by BEE LB
Full Moon Over I-40
Ty Zhang
“I venture no more than a low whisper,
afraid I’ll wake the people of heaven.”
– Li Bai
Suspended in clear night,
the full moon bleeds
over the cracked highway.
The self-soothing asphalt drinks its fill
of light,
scorned in some places by blistering, demeaning
fluorescence–a cruder source.
You glimpsed the truth,
you think,
at least part of it,
sitting at work today–
through a window and a door
you never open,
inside the shadow of a tree
that flickered and swayed
over the body of another,
then bloated, then joined
the sum of dusk.
In three exits,
you’ll be home.
You know what awaits
in the kitchen, by the shoes.
The pale strength of the moon
has roused your old and dying pains.
They’re there now, lined up
one by one,
A row of shy, smoldering fires
asking for your forgiving arms
to rock them back to sleep.
“What kind of clouds are those?”
she asked you once, long ago
and a country away.
“No kind,” you whisper now,
as the steering wheel languishes
in your tightening grip.
Ty Zhang (he/him) is a lawyer, poet, and political organizer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His work has recently appeared in Assignment Literary Magazine, Progenitor Art & Literary Journal, and Meniscus.
BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, the space beneath a collapsed ceiling on unceded Anishinaabe land in Michigan. they have been published in FOLIO, Figure 1, The Offing, and Harpur Palate, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co and they can be found at patreon.com/twinbrights