It Would Be Easier to Stop Talking to Your Ghost Stella Li (bio) if I could compare you to pear blossoms, sister, licks of cream that drizzle the air smelling like shit. Buttery funk, stippled gold wooing salt from my eyes, maybe this is how spring is meant to be: a tremble of winter. But the shrine in your room beckons to me every so often. On Sundays and holy days, I line the shelves: A glass cat, a clay pot the color ofmud caked across a bay mare, two shadows of brown against parchment corsages. Shallow- welled candles and a lazy-eyed tiger. I ask after you this way, offering things brittle and withering and fragrant and dusted soft. I fill your bed with heaps of linen. Count down until you return. A bralette, rippled and pilled. T-shirts washed quiet against my skin, two holes in thearmpit. In the bathroom next to ours, I stare at the lace in the toilet bowl, the smattering of piss. I wonder if this mirror is a little kinder than the others, if she will forgive me for searching for your face in her. From the top of the stairs, your voicesounds like crumpling origami, pestle grinding mortar. I want to ask. Can you hear me listening mid- flight. Will I ever find a way to fill the emptiness with snow. [End Page 64] newton, no. 3 in shanghai I pulled my body through a temple / pushed an umbrella against the sky. under the soupy grey / I drew dishwater through my teeth / rumbled / hurled myself back into the wet. you / & I, over / and over / again: we pulled our ghosts / & held suitcases against our bellies / & lurched down the subway stairs, rain- / falling against our ankles. in his apartment, so quiet / so overwhelmed with bodies / I pushed the table in circles / pulled lotus root & sweet osmanthus / & pink- / pearled shrimp / & liver & skin-crisp / & sea / & cucumber into orbit. the clementine was green / I remember. I slicked apologies across my forehead / showered off the exhaust / spilt hot water on my knee / etc. etc. in my dreams, the yellow river was the color of coffee / cream, no sugar / it tasted like pith. tiger leaping gorge: the water fought itself white. it is still maybe / the ugliest feline I have ever seen. each day broke / on compromise. we could not push the mountain to / breakage so we pulled our feet up the steps. we climbed towards the lights in the canal / & lost at the mahjong tables. we climbed the splitting stairway / & melted milk popsicles into the dirt. I rowed into the water / biked on the walls / cupped a buddha’s cheeks in my hands / tripped through the bamboo. I curled my spine over a bridge / but grandma would not let me pull the cat / from below. in tibet we sucked oxygen into our lungs from / cans. paid extra just to breathe. in those months when I fevered at the cheeks I dreamt / the cicada shelled from the body became ring thumbed against my lips. I pulled / summers up from the ground by the fist- / full. the sun intensified / kindly / & the distance between home / & home shrank to the width of a freeway. in all of my dreams I am running away from some- / body. cigarette fumes and the musk of a flooded city follow me as I / knock apartment buildings down like dominos. watch the pushing & pulling. awake / I recall that there is no way back / forward. [End Page 65] Stella Li Stella Li is a high school senior from West Windsor, New Jersey. An alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and an editor of Ephimiliar Journal, she has been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, the National Flash Fiction Day Competition, the National Poetry Quarterly, and her mother, among others. Copyright © 2021 Pleiades Press