FOREWORD

One year ago, I wrote this poem for Pariah’s 2024 Spring Edition, armed only with a chord progression I borrowed from Rachmaninoff and far too many tears for kidnapped passion. Back then, I struggled to organize everything I wanted to say into something cohesive; what I came up with was raw, truthful, genuine, but it wasn’t at all resolved. The weight of my authenticity tangled with my ability to articulate it.

In October, six months after it was published, I found this poem in the depths of my saved documents. I held it like a box of emotions I’d forcibly stuffed away with time; “closure” that only concluded my willingness to dwell on it any longer. And yet, as I read the poem, the past I desperately tried to forget came rushing back — after all, I’ve played it into muscle memory. It’s hard to forget when your body remembers.

So I looked at my poem, looked into it and not through it, and tore it down. I un-nailed floorboards, skinned meaning, flattened bones. Started again, pinning the scrapped material in the right places, carrying all the new emotions and experiences I hoarded in those six months. I drilled, plastered, painted until I was satisfied, until every word meant something new and I could finally hear my own voice.

I decided to send the freshly revised poem to “R,” the subject of this poem, completely on a whim. I couldn’t fully mend our relationship; the scars on the wood of these words made sure of that. I thrust it through the year-long silence before I could regret it — (“do you know who this is about?” / “yes, I do.”) — but perhaps he understood more than I did.

Now, a full year since I first wrote the poem, I am presenting this revised version for the 2025 Spring Edition. A poetic, conclusive, full circle moment. Here is “i can play our past like the coda of a concerto,” reimagined, reinvented — its reprise. 

Ava Shu

— for R

I.

(You tell me of this:)

The ebbing tide

of strings with woodwinds

carry vibrato in its breath as it

trembles in my chest, the water

crescendoing into a dramatic arpeggio—

Seizes me when it crashes over, 

drowns me with each inhale of

     a cadenza, washing out every

reaction, every tear I can afford to waste

and my fingers — searching 

for a score in the goosebumps on 

my skin — grasp my arms, but I am the shell 

of a mollusk that had abandoned its home;

there is nothing left behind dead skin.

iii.

you read me like a painting,

observed all my chameleon colors

to find truth within my ingenuities; watched

landforms of acrylic facade peeling from canvas

and you told me about it all.

i breathed in your words like smoke,

chemical guilt that eroded my lungs

fueled by my envy, my 

[love]

the feeling of my heart swelling and shriveling

at once, Schrodinger's cat but it's my pride

in the box, my ego

     on the line

between you and me

following the outline of oblique motion:

prepared, suspended,

(un)     resolved.

vi7.

there is polaris —

aligned to the head of my bed where i stood tip-toed at ten, 

reaching to press the glow-in-the-dark dot into the ceiling.

there’s dubhe and merak, on a straight line six inches away

          positions calculated, proportions measured,

and the other five stars strung on invisible strands

that weaved to form the big dipper before i grew tired 

          of playing a God that sat below the sky.

i left it alone in the dark, 

     a lonely constellation on a plane of white.

and you: 

you conducted the night itself, drew 

the rhythm     of the moon and its stars

while i could not even complete your counterfeit. 

i didn’t have the right to despise you for it—

you were too deserving of everything

to make me feel like i deserved anything.

i just looked at you, but never reached to hold.

iv.

you were my muse in the worst way,

my false god. shrines and lines

of altars stood decorated and desecrated 

in the center of my subconscious. possessed 

me in the form of the vandalized portraits

i'd painted     in my head, the ones i scrubbed

with the remains of my memory, my will.

a prayer for the dying, hymn for the dead. dressed

this body in white and drowned me in your water. 

i bathed in hatred for your virtuosity 

and shame for my hatred

     yet at the same time, i ached to please you.

so i write for you.

I. 

I listen to the end 

of Rach 2          mvt 2

again, like you told me to 

six months ago. It traces 

the line of an emotion I can’t identify, 

one that unravels all my stitches 

into a mess of bare, fragile thread.

I like to think that it is you on the

          other end,

pulling my body apart on a single strand

     with your baton.

It’s an endless losing war, the tug between

conductor and pianist — a duet

of a one-way battle. I guess 

there’s always your stars to look up to. 

I promise          to watch you

from my piano bench.

The orchestra takes its final breath.