M. Ezra Zhang

Park Ekphrastic Without Park

First day of fall finds me in mourning—
something about 50 Fahrenheit I’m not ready for,
might never be ready for the rest of my life.
Something I’ve had to learn: the park is still here
when I’m not in it. The park is still here when the sycamores
catch fire, so red and bright they begin their slow
disintegration into the kind of white that thaws
in any ashtray of any room of your prewar apartment.
First time I heard about prewar apartments I thought
the war was still ahead of us. I’m convinced
the end is coming, if only the end to summer’s heat haze
in which you shimmered so un-mirage-like
that I believed us

to be slow dancing underwater.

I have been working on my object permanence.
Holding the park in my mind, imagining it returning
to me every spring despite its new blush. And I want
to be honest with you: I wrote this poem without being
inside the park at all. I followed a flurry of foliage
into the dark, willing myself to believe it would
emerge from the tunnel as a human being. I know
you love me but what if you change your mind?

M. Ezra Zhang (Twitter: @mezrazhang) is a queer Chinese American writer based in Brooklyn. A Best New Poets and Pushcart Prize nominee, they have attended the Tin House Poetry Workshop and been recognized by the Poetry Society of the UK. They are an MFA candidate at New York University and the creator of the Simp Alignment Chart. Read their work in Ninth Letter, Redivider, Salt Hill Journal, and other publications.