Three Poems by Amanda Grace Shu

Becoming Horizon

Weeks after marriage to please rain
god, frogs divorced to end downpour.
–New Delhi Television, 9/13/ 2019

We were brown and green as new mud
when they wed us, the ones who smeared sindoor
from my forehead down the ridges of my barren
back. Crushed cinnabar and turmeric and lime-
stone slaked with what water they could spare
to furrow me in vermillion, all the way down
to the shakti at the spineroot.

Rain, they chanted. Parched throats called their god
who split the bellies of the mountains. The waters came
streaming forth like bellowing milk-cows. Your skin
ripened like lemons then, your puffed-up throat
lapis lazuli blue and wider than your eye.
Bridegroom, you and I brought the monsoon

and after us, the flood washed everything away,
dissolved our clay bodies in a water jug
and swept us out to sea, where I became the red-
streaked sky, and you, the burning sun
perched on the ocean’s edge, rippling.

Hanahaki

hanahaki (n.) – an invented disease, primarily found in
fanfiction, in which a person coughs up flower petals until
they confess their love to someone and the love is requited

would it have been any better if instead of phlegm
flowers filled your lungs if you coughed up chrysanthemums
tissues stained with pollen when you pressed them to your lips
if you died with lilacs blooming in between your ribs

petals strewn across the black-top pavement where you fell
if i had seen them there could i have loved you back to health
dug up every seed that rooted deep inside your chest
cleared away the weeds that clogged your throat and choked your breath […]

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Gardeners

For Carol Hoch-Weber Ross
Sept. 26, 1929–Feb. 15, 2023

God sits my grandma down with her nemesis—
the plump black bunny, fatted up for Easter,
feasting gleefully on Beaverton backyards—
and says, Really, Carol, they were just petunias.

Eden’s landscaping is immaculate. Species
long since gone from earth grow all over:
heart-seeded silphium, Saint Helena olive,
dawn-of-time redwood and peregrine pine,
all but the stubbornest of the ginkgoes, holei
yellow wood and greenhood incognita underfoot. […]

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Amanda Grace Shu is a biracial Asian-American poet and fiction writer, and a recent MFA graduate from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope series, and Kaleidoscope, and her fiction in Daily Science Fiction. A lover of language and all its chaotic, inventive, and endlessly changing beauty, she believes that words can build worlds both fantastical and familiar, and that creative writing is a powerful empathetic act through which we come to truly understand one another. She also obsesses over cats, writes trivia games, and names her pens after silly puns. Read more at amandagraceshu.com.