Tiffany & Annie & me are playing on the swings.

they’re singing a Taylor Swift song I don’t know yet,

and so I wait two verses before joining in,

think I can try the chorus the second time around,

but then, it’s just me, voice quavering, me and

all these words I don’t know,

two girls silently staring at me:

stop acting like you know the notes.

 

Tiffany comes back from vacation

with one lollipop for Annie.

Tiffany plucks my hair at lunch

and asks why I got split ends.

Tiffany says I have to walk behind them

so we can be a triangle.

no one knows loneliness like a 7-year-old girl.

 

I saw her once, last year, draped on the arm of a friend

of a friend. drenched in holiday party sparkle,

a little red blister of a person.

she giggles as she tells her date:

oh, we used to kind of bully Juliana.

 

I don’t sing in public, but god, I wish I did then,

slung my fat tongue over her stupid little hoops

until it made a shiny pink welt on her eardrums.

yodeled until a chandelier fell on her head.

funny how new wounds sound like old wounds.

 

I wish I sang then,

but what I was scared of was this:

I open my mouth, and nothing comes out

but two giggles, two sets of rolling eyes,

one single searching note

wandering quietly into the rafters.

 

Juliana Chang

Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American poet. She is the 2019 recipient of the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, the 2017 recipient of the Wiley Birkhofer Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medalist in Poetry. She received a BA in Linguistics and a MA in Sociology from Stanford University in 2019. Her debut chapbook INHERITANCE was the winner of the 2020 Vella Contest and published with Paper Nautilus Press in 2021.

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