Dialectic by Alexandra Wong

On the mesas fossils bloom under moonlight.

Bone flower. Flesh flower. Vanishes at

five thirty a.m. Lilac again. Pours out of my

mouth, a silent glossolalia of petals from spongy

lung. I feel it less than tangled hair, 

wind chapstick. I carbon date myself

and find I am perennially seventeen and 

sixty million years. I radiate

variably. To fool the Geiger counter I submerge in the river

until hair falls straight and face is clear. Pretty

tragedy. I share catharsis with the canyon. I was

born inside it. I was born from the lilac. Water

birthed me. Water delivered me, a definite

shape of soft crystals. We abide

forever. I slowly etch away – weathering 

the rock, emitting gamma rays. 

You are the exoskeleton

to our flowering. Residual fragments

splintering in skin say no you are trapped

both ways. 

---

Alexandra Wong is an eighteen-year-old student and writer from New York. Her work is published or forthcoming in Crashtest Magazine and Galliard International Review, and she is the managing editor at Intersections Magazine. She is currently taking a gap year and plans to pursue foreign policy at Princeton University next year.