April Yu
April Yu is a Pushcart-nominated teenage writer from New Jersey. Her work has been recognized by the New York Times, Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Wigleaf Top 50, and Ringling College of Art and Design. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Mercurial Collective and published in Peach Mag, The Lumiere Review, Milk Candy Review, The Aurora Journal, FEED, and more. She is a graduate of the Adroit Summer Mentorship Program and the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. Visit her on Twitter @aprilgoldflwrs and at aprilyu.carrd.co.
Easy read of the poems in the images above:
a beautiful country
america loves telling you that you are not enough. buck-toothed, broken-mouthed, she slurs your mother’s name on the same syllable of a dream so hallucinogenic it feels like smoking your brains out. chains of diamond from mineral mines. dresses that explode you indigo-blue. emerald city waits in the distance if you only walk the roads paved in gold. forget yourself, she murmurs. god, you people are so sensitive when we talk to you. how about I teach you what to be. if you become, you’ll never have to chase anything again. just forget how we set your house on fire and watched your family go up in flames. killing is not just the ax and the blood that comes after, it’s a sacrifice you’ll have to make if you want to root out what’s wrong with you. learn to cut your losses and you’ll be well on your way to being a real american. mama is on the porch again in her rocking chair, ivy crawling her body as her paper eyelids flutter shut. now, if you look at her in this light, she is not dead, just sleeping. on sundays her corpse will even walk you to church. perfect. quit moving that way. resist and we’ll blaze you up too. sing one of your songs while we take you in if that makes you feel better. this is an embrace, by the way, so stop acting as if your whole life has become ashes and wildfire. underneath any man is the ability to become civilized. velvet-suited and straight-teethed. we’ll rechristen your hair, nails, thighs until you’re good enough. x-ray and x-ray and x-ray until your cells explode and you’re just another nameless no-face trailing wreckage through our golden streets. your mama watches you with bleeding eyes. zinc tears won’t do anything, mother, you say—welcome to America.
Child of a Child
(CW: references to weapons and violence)
when adam stretches his fingers toward God, their hands are mirror images.
white holy cleansed beings. adam baptizing himself to wash God clean.
a girl grows up in a barn-door house on her knees for God’s mercy;
the only one she meets is her mother’s. her bruises gash the sky
black-blue, bloody, open. a towheaded boy walks fields of ash vigils and
makes flower crowns from barbed wire. these cornfield corpses have his
father’s touch. did you know God protects His children?
under bluelight moon, it’s hard to tell your parents from yourself, but
you watch as they fill each other up with bullets and blame
each other for their mutual deaths. their hands, pocked from kitchen knives
and bladed words, bulge like wildflowers exploding from the mouth of a
gun. you swallow and the bile roots in your loaded fingers. in twenty years
you’ll kill your dad because you hate that he was a killer. in the mirror,
your bones are collapsing inward. your head is a black hole or gunfire.
only God’s children know that their faces are not theirs.
one thousand years later, adam’s child of a child wakes from a dream.
he stretches and stretches and stretches and all he finds is empty space.
