Xiadi Zhai

EYERIES

These days:
not much.
A man collects his adult
daughter’s cigarette bums
from the ashtray into
a plastic liter bottle, something
precious I’m not
allowed. Fran,
footsure since youth, feeds me
the fish we hooked together.
Hake-spine lodged between
my teeth, her ring
is in the ashtray too—
there is a white-
sunned sheep vertebra caught
on my shoelace,
holed all over, and I cross
my ankles to conceal it.
The copper mine
ruin isn’t slanting
quite right these days,
Fran says, open-mouthed
with a new face
freckled onto her old. We all know
how the pub proprietor
sold the piano. Hush.
A leg touches mine
beneath the table,
beneath plates of half-fish,
stays for a breath.
Act normal now.
You know how—no,
come now, you must
do better than that, straighten
your sightline,
shuffle your deck
and smile, you good
woman, you.

XIADI ZHAI is from Boston, Massachusetts. She received her MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has work in Court Green, Quarterly West, and Reed Magazine.