Size / / /

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Here it is, this haunted house, smaller than my thumb. As I press my eye to it, I perceive in this order: a window, a rose bush, a fish, a belly, a thorn. Here is the path that leads to the house. Nails are buried under it. Black pepper is sprinkled over it. Here is the door. It looks like a tooth. It smells like a frog. Surrounding the house is a silence. It is larger than the house. Mid-sized, in fact. It folds over itself in layers of stillness, layers which absorb all movement into themselves. I am not certain of their origin — this silence and this stillness. Whenever I have been still, I have not been silent. Whenever I have been silent, I have not been still. Like a clash of cymbals, my mind and my skin have often been at the same time roiling and blaring. But inside the haunted house, I am silent. Perhaps this is a side-effect of the shrinking. I would not be surprised. Death is only called death when it is all-encompassing. Now my mind is smaller than my body, the way it was supposed to be. When I press my eye to the window again I see: a fin, a petal, my brain, my sky and my sea.



Portia Yu is a poet from Hong Kong. Her poems can be found in literary journals including Worm Moon Archive, celestite poetry, and Crow & Cross Keys. In addition, her work has appeared in Where Else: An Anthology of Hong Kong Poetry.
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16 Feb 2026

Water is life here, and it's evident in that if you stray too far off the beaten path and away from water, you will get lost and you’ll be lucky if anyone sees you again before sundown. My village is settled neatly between two gentle rolling mesas and along a thin river in a sparsely populated community lovingly called ‘the valley’.
In the beginning, the ocean was lonely / and so she created a fifteen-year-old girl / (or was it the other way around?)
It’s me not you, and the / Hole in the sky still weeps sticky tears.
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