The Sad Siren
I have a knack for making men stay
for all the wrong reasons. The zeal-bitten
historians. The shy classicists. Nightly, from
the fire escape, they came for the famed
antebellum phosphorescence
of my voice, but stayed for the way
fire escaped from the tidal clench
& thrust of my hips, the kind of flames
pure as white grapes
that seared a vision
right through their bodies
and made their dumb flesh see
the heaven their eyes had refused
to believe in, which is the heaven of here
-and-now, which is the hour of never
-and-always—for which the city, in loneliness, burns
and all its good angels burn with it. I came
when they sobbed into the hollow
of my collarbone afterward. How
anticlimactic: their tears flooding open
an eye inside me, which I didn’t
even know was there
and now I can’t close it.
Siren's Grindr Profile
Name: Siren, lost
in a sea of what ifs
Age: gone with the blossoms, hallowed
by sparrows
Height: only as tall as the distance
traversed by the fragrance
of a hyacinth
Weight: a single dewdrop, its sheer skin
pierced by the wind
Ethnicity: unsung, blue-feathered dawn
lifting a veil
of swirling snow
off history’s sand-worn face
Tribes: salt lantern / wife of a volcano / serpent
-skinned boy riding
the riptide
of a nameless yearning
Body Type: exhalation
of starlight
by which to steer
the leaf boat of my soul
Gender: tiger-striped silence
Position: moth to ash / ash
to flame, either way is fine
Looking for: heart-to-heart, as in when we kiss
under the luminous sovereignty
of a wolf moon
my heart climbs like vines of star jasmine
onto the oaken trellis of your heart, then
more kisses
to drown our lips
Relationship Status: widow of a lantern’s flame, married
to the new year’s
first snowfall
Meet at: the lily-studded meadow between Can’t you see
you’re hurting me and Please
don’t stop, please
don’t
where the moon always sheds
its sequined bodice of light
Find me on: earth, water, air, fire
The Quiet Siren
In one version of the legend the sirens couldn’t sing.
—Robert Hass, “Envy of Other People’s Poems”
How disappointed they were
when the sailors discovered
I couldn’t sing. The girl I was—
netted in the wet blooms of my own
waist-length hair the color of thunder
booming over a field of frost.
I didn’t know how stranded I was
until I opened my eyes, fresh out
of the lukewarm sea, to a world
that didn’t want me. Pretty pearl,
the sailors called to me, rowing
their great gray ship around me
that cut pear blossoms in its wake.
Let us teach you how to sing. So
they sang in deep, dappled voices
and beneath the moon-streaked ice
of their age-old chantey
a river flowed darkly that made me
shiver as I listened more closely
than I had intended, bending down
to catch the words
but the ice broke open beneath me
and swallowed me so that everywhere
I turned, instead of words, there
was darkness & water: not the kind
I was used to, but water so cold it scorched
my flesh into sunlight, water so empty
it blew through the reed flute
of my body like high-mountain air.
What did I know. O the girl I was,
thunder-haired & bird-boned. What
I would give to be that girl again.
I couldn’t sing then. Now that I can,
I open my mouth and every song
that flies out of me
is bitter.
GAVIN YUAN GAO (they/xe) is a genderqueer immigrant poet. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Journal, Foundry, The Shade Journal and elsewhere. Their first book of poetry, At the Altar of Touch, is forthcoming from University of Queensland Press.
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