Taylor Zhang
Plastic Summer
In dreams, flesh sticks to my skin, sweat
an echo of those who came before,
the heat already tedious when I wake.
Off the highway now for ice cream, never mind
that the car stalled yesterday. Past the exit:
one million umbrellas. Crowds,
languishing, watch a dollhouse bake
in the sun. We sit among them, docile.
At our disposal: your atrocious Uber rating
and only two likes for my latest Tweet.
How to survive past three pm?
Ponderous, laborious written in a file
you were never supposed to read.
The personality of a swallow, you admit.
But it is an effort even to swallow, no?
Taylor Zhang reads “Plastic Summer”
Taylor Zhang is an English teacher. She runs a small Risograph press (Choo Choo Press) that publishes literary zines with an emphasis on queerness, nostalgia, obsession, and states of liminality. Her own work can be found or is forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Vassar Review, The Louisville Review, The Drift, and Columbia Journal. Originally from Jackson, Mississippi, she now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.