INTERROGATION
“Do you have a problem?”
“Do you have a problem?”
Me?
You’re asking me?
What problem could I possibly have?
“Then what’s your answer?”
I searched myself—
wrists, mouth, chest—
found nothing.
“Then what are you doing?”
I knelt.
I heard it splinter beneath me.
Glass.
I gathered,
held them.
My own eyes.
Pressed them to my face.
A strange warmth bled into my mouth.
I licked it.
It
was the only happiness
I had today.
FREE SCARECROW
I cannot understand
what you are saying.
So I drive a pencil
into my eye—
thinking perhaps
my ears will grow sharper.
But what I hear
is only the drip of thick liquid.
I taste it,
iron-sweet,
like milk
gone to rust.
It deafens me.
Two pencils
into the ears.
At last, the world falls dumb.
These twisted machines of language.
I kill them, at last.
I am fucking satisfied—
pencils make my face a scarecrow,
Free, free, free!
Arms spread wide,
convinced
I already planted
in the barren field.
HOW I CRUSH MY THOUGHTS
Since I was nine,
life has pressed its wrinkled hands around my throat—
its face shifting.
The suited ones—
and I, nothing more than
an empty can
stuffed inside a torn plastic bag.
I stand at the window,
clouds rehearse
their white indecisions.
Below:
the ground awaits me.
Will it be a clean shatter,
or half a life in paralysis?
Proud parents,
a partner fulfilled?
In this ridiculous magic trick
I am the body in the box,
the swords pierce every organ.
They bleed,
to make me lighter—
if only in falling.
So I open the door.
I decide to leave.
Pain climbs my leg.
A rusty nail
rises through my heel,
like an artificial flower.
The crowd appears—
a carnival of teeth and color.
They laugh like hyenas
chained to a carousel.
I join them, louder.
Raise my foot.
Stamp it down—
again.
Again!
-- Sean Wang is a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominated poet and PhD candidate. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, ONE ART, wildscape. literary journal, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.