The Doppler Effect
A boy swallows what he’s told are vitamins
and fails out of calculus.
In a CVS parking lot
Ziploc bags exchange hands
like quarters. A boy used
to swallow himself
into the moon, cratered
with different names
for parts of the body:
eye an apple he carves
a bowl out of,
stomach the flickering door
between hospital rooms,
hands blades sharpened into
blade wounds, blood
the color of a mirror:
only reflecting the mother’s
sorrow for a failed child.
The years scatter on the sidewalk
like bits of leather caught between
animal and diary,
diary and deity
peering through a wineglass
refracting a flatline
into the curves of a beating heart
as if to say: something will
stop the truck.
Something will cradle sparks
back into the sun.
Callouses used
to coat his speech, laden blue with
alleyway promises,
the difference between
how every color of dirt makes dirt
but every color of light
whitens into an unpaintable canvas:
the day before, the lamp
had chiseled tiny wolves
into the hollow of his throat.
With a thumb
he mothered the shadow
into splaying, but not enough—
as he lifted his hand
a creature lifted into embryo into
the whine of tires splitting the horizon
Ava Chen is a student poet from Massachusetts. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Sophon Lit and edits for Polyphony Lit. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming with The Penn Review, The Mantle, The Dawn Review, and elsewhere, and has been recognized by Columbia College Chicago, The Adroit Prizes, The Poetry Society of the U.K., and more. Ava was a 2023 Poetry Mentee in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.