Ghost Town, Great Neck

Sophia Liu

I was queer in the summer, but
now I’m a girl. I wait in the courtyard
for someone to love but it’s a rigid January
following a snowless December,
and I miss the sun like an old neighbor.
Light cowers under blankets and blankets of highway and
too many girls settle for boys I could swallow.
A squirrel eats from a bird feeder. A school bus swooshes by
and a garbage truck clicks into every driveway.
I trace my steps enough times that my body
bores me. I scroll and scroll but there is no end. Just the
boy who sits across from me in physics posting himself grinning goldenly
as a girl’s thighs wrap around his neck.
His comments rave. He’s been
coming late to class. I’ve been
skipping breakfast and eating my greens in scantrons,
calculating my body’s rate of change in
second derivatives. Whatever. The fog eats everything. I am
back home blinking myself awake to an ambulance
bleeding a lullaby. A school bus swooshes by
and a garbage truck clicks into every driveway. And summer is
an imagined lover who reminds me that the only thing left
to fall in love with is myself.

Sophia Liu is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. The author of the poetry chapbook There Is No Happy Ending (New Rivers Press, 2023), her work appears in Frontier Poetry, Puerto del Sol, AAWW: The Margins, Muzzle, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. She studies Cognitive Science at Yale College.