How Was Your Day?
If by day you mean evening, it starts like this:
the sky is really too electric (it was painted by a hand who had
just painted something for the first time)
It is red like a slow pouring of gazpacho—tomato, but there is blended cucumber
and the cream&basil&oliveoil are the colors of the-shirt-I-wore-today
when I ran in the rain—
then the tie-dye began to bleed so I took it off and got catcalled for the first time.
Or maybe by day you mean morning, and in that case
I am training to be a frat boy—
I played cup pong on my phone on the bus and broke my eyes like you told me
not to, and then I caught a cold from the marble floor like you told me not to too.
Or maybe your question concerns earlier, one o’clock maybe—in ceramics class, I painted my
ramen
bowl
red copper—
this glaze, it will seep into your soup and gloss your insides so the doctors that cut
you open will never want to cut anyone open again.
Or maybe you mean now, in this bistro—
and to that I say the service is too slow—
Just bring up the soup, maybe this time there will be
more asparagus (and your father floating in the croutons,
he just wants to ask you how your day was.)
About the author: Rachel Zhu lives in New York and is currently a junior at Horace Mann School. She is the cofounder and Editor in Chief of Horace Mann’s creative prose magazine, LitMag. Outside of school, Zhu writes creative short prose and poetry, and is also an artist and ceramicist. She draws influence from her Chinese background and culture as well as classical European and American works of literature. Through her work, she hopes to inspire other Asian Americans to express their stories and experiences through the world of humanities and art. She has a piece forthcoming in Blue Marble.
