ANDY LOPEZ
Lore
If they ask – & they will
tell them this is how I loved you:
into unabashed revision, in full riot gear,
that I lifted my pen out of spite.
There we were: a failed audition story.
So we brined our tongues, scrubbed suds into our country
of dirt, that old stubborn scalp. Tucked our horns away for fish-scraps
of screen time. I was grateful; was taught to clean my plate,
fisting the seconds & running as fast as I could, into a better
page, like a brown Prometheus, exploding ink where it gleamed,
white as wishbone, a story we broke between us:
the good version the bad
As if somewhere we exist unsoured by survival
As if somewhere your laugh fails to make light leaks
out of me. I was afraid if I kissed you they’d cross kiss
replace it with some gentrified idea of love
The kind that came out of cans or photobooths
all airbrushed & without the pulp In our application
I wrote i promise our bodies can bottle light too
Now they want to watch how we shit the seeds out
out of every hole prove it / what you call divinity
What if I’m just an animal trying not to be seen?
So I ran stitched our mouths into a myth
large enough for two children to live inside it
In this version we grow roots deep enough
to touch motherland Nothing that moves here will bite
I braid our endings into brilliant beginnings
& the earth yields us her treasures: my hands / a house
before flowers / land so luminous like nothing has yet
died in it & no one will ever say too much;
you can want but only up to here ]
Oh to be named like any other
in the archive that remembers
cw: animal death
How to Play By Ear
From the outside looking in:
The piano, still sealed behind the chapel
doors. Unseen, the hamster growing cold
in the skirt pocket of the girl I’d been.
I’m thinking: I did it; I survived you.
So much of my girlhood still runs
away from me. I don’t recall that piano
ever making a sound.
Didn’t you sneak me in
so I could prove a point? Water-logged
the chord pitched under my hand like a question.
And our ankle-length skirts, didn’t they droop
with only seconds of rainwater. How they clung
like someone else’s skin.
Stuffing our wet socks between the AC’s teeth,
our laughter skidding across the tiles,
I thought us freer than anyone.
Our upperclassman floated through the puddles
with a practiced uncold. I didn’t care
for their pink lips, the latest technology
of waterproof youth. I didn’t want to disappear
like that. But who was to say we weren’t, already?
Standing in the warpath of a bright red swing,
the seat sickled high in the sky
to blot out the sun: how easy to vanish.
What I believe to be true: the hot burst of metal
against my cheek, boys who’ll fold me
into corners, first blood, apologies from the dean.
They stripped the swing-set of its swings.
Sealed the rift tight as if the water
had not already breached this room too.
In my pocket, my friend turned to stone.
I thought maybe God could return the years to me,
dripping on the pew, no place for a girl’s grief.
Instead, I trapped him in a bottle filled with tap water.
There, floating strangely, he was alive forever—
until later, the sweet-sick stench hemmed
us to our seats in Sex Ed class.
I buried him in the sandbox.
I don’t remember if this really happened.
Most days I still doubt what I’d witnessed:
the sandbox empty of sand, phantom pianos
with ants crawling over the keys, the mind riddled
with exit wounds, holes everywhere.
Andy Lopez is a writer and advocacy communications manager from the Philippines. Her work has been anthologized in the Best of Small Fictions 2021 and can be found in Longleaf Review, CHEAP POP, Non.Plus Lit, and other magazines and anthologies. Find her on Twitter at @andylopezwrites.