Elise Tao
Elise Tao (she/her) is an incoming freshman at Harvard College and is the founder of the multimedia teen magazine Synthesis Publications. Her work is forthcoming or has previously been published in DIAGRAM, Poetry Online, Assembly by The Malala Fund, The Apprentice Writer, The Interlochen Review, and Sole Magazine. When she is not poem-ing, you can find her collecting Lana Del Rey vinyls and catching the Sunday matinee.
CAPTIVITY
i. Google Photos Memory of Girl Who Did Not Want to Have Her Picture Taken
When I stroll through the flea markets of Changsha
with my mother, I pause
at every anthropomorphic image–
Hello Kitty, sheep with large eyes, chicken
who talks. I’ve been so innocent–no, afraid
of phantoms all this time. I slept with stuffed toys
until I was thirteen, found the velcro on my sandals
fascinating enough to distract me from everyone’s sneers
and all my best hypotheses in painting class
at Sunday school. I remember when laurels
serenaded me with unfounded reassurances—my hair
parted to one side, my hair clumped into a braid.
I don’t realize the camera is pointed to my right,
and when I do, I turn left.
ii. Dance and Song
I glisten faintly in a sunroom at midnight
until the afternoon flickers into my graying zest.
Until my mind will stop horsemaning critics
from victims, therapists from superstars. I can’t
count on one hand the selves I’ve decapitated.
I either forgot about these relics or lulled them
to sleep, swooped them by the knee pits away
from home–half-killed by pity, half-preserved
by grace. Cheesy plastic in the shape of medallions
hang around my neck. Fuck, I might always
be this antithetic. Sometimes adults wonder
why I continue to dress in calf-length cuts
my mother piled into my hunched frame. Or why
my acne always bristles out in heat, provoking
the rice I left out to collect flies in the kitchen. Best
of all, they question my stillness
as they gouge my ribs out with a butterknife. Yet
as all rational people would, they enjoy defeat
medium rare. Succumb to blindness, I say. Watch
every friend brush my novelty, then purge themselves
ashore, all over my Converse. I leave
voice messages stacked in envelopes–I only love you
because I’m a con artist. Do what you know
best–avoid the girls oxidizing in captivity.