Prospect Heights
for Lyon
Chenyue Wang
Counterweight
Monty Reid
Sleeping on the pilling gray sofa
you hauled home from IKEA, I sneeze
because the fabric wears
your Siamese hair. Even now, Princess hisses
at my feet. By midnight, you are still
playing APEX on a voice call, my head
coddled in your lap, my eyes
swollen with yawning. You hand me
another Claritin. The next morning, I tiptoe
across the bathroom tiles while reciting the ritual
of your household: Don’t stomp
across the floor. Refill the black bottle
with shampoo. So simple, yet I always forget, always
the clumsy little sister following you home
from the apartment complex pool. The water
falling over my hair drags me back
to our teal summer pool long ago. Our water fights,
inexorable as the sun. Your hands
pressed my face below the water, bubbling
years of tension we believed we left behind.
You don’t remember,
probably. You can choose
what to blame: vinegar stains ruining
the white tablecloth you just washed, or water spots
freckling your bathroom faucet. You are
no longer taller than I am, but you still look down
at me whenever you say You should be
sorry. I already am, but I won’t trade the silence
for another afternoon churning
childhood with every splash. Once, you asked to see
the poems I’ve written, which reminded me of the wood-
colored notebook & your acne-prone face
when you left it with me. Don’t think
I’m faulting you. Don’t read my poems.
You marked your ownership
in blue ink, notebook pages ripped away
like the twelve years between us: sisterly strangers,
born to be sisters.
Chenyue Wang is a poet from Beijing, China, currently a high school senior at Westover School. A poetry editor of The Bokeh Review, she has published in Trampoline, Pictura Journal, Vagabond City, and DePaul’s Blue Book: Best American High School Writing, among others. Find Chenyue on Instagram.
Monty Reid is an Ottawa poet. He has coupled a 30-year career in museums (Provincial Museum of Alberta. the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Canadian Museum of Nature) with an even longer career as a poet. He has published a dozen full-length collections and almost 30 chapbooks with small presses across Canada and abroad. A new collection, Intelligence 1.1, is forthcoming from the University of Calgary Press and he is currently completing Intelligence 1.2. He worked for Arc Poetry Magazine for many years and was the Director of VerseFest, Ottawa’s international poetry festival, for almost a decade. Now retired, he can be found in his backyard garden, trying to grow peaches. Find Monty on BlueSky and Instagram.