summer cleaves itself open
[ Diemmy Dang ]

raw and quick as a memory.
three songs too deep, I watch the tender flesh

of heat & sweat & exhaust spill
from June's bloated body, the world

loosening into surrender. in this hollow
crevice of night, clumsy hands meet

half-formed answers and wounds
drain from mouths cradling

overgrown confession. how nice it is,
to forget ourselves. how nice, to

skin our restlessness and sell it
for bravery. some place between

soiled sneakers and the swelling
of cheap LED lights, I see a flicker

of a half-forgotten face. I let myself
mistake: a boy for a landline for a tether

for a house for a horizon
for a god. funny how I can still

excavate his name from the pocket
of my ribs, as if he’s always been

part of me. funny how we are smoke-sick
enough to swallow our contradictions

whole, to believe that lies are just
wanting, reborn as truth. and so

I say: I miss you in the way
the body betrays itself, curdling

around the bruise to memorialize
its own hurt. we fall further into

the hard-edged throat of Tonight
and somewhere here, everywhere,

a girl crawls inside of herself for long
enough to unravel. a boy burns a

bridge and lights himself on fire
with it. we all fend off the creeping

door of daylight for just a little
longer, clinging onto what we know

will soon be chiseled clean, cremated and
buried by tomorrow’s forgetting.

Diemmy Dang is a student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she writes for 34th Street Magazine and serves as a content manager for the Penn Review. Find her on campus eating cheese at the Kelly Writers House and find more of her writing on her Substack, Internet Ramblings.