Second Life

COHORT 4

a Golden Shovel Poem after “Shelter” by Porter Robinson & Madeon

with writing experimentation by Serrina Zou, Lorena Horng, & Cynthia Feng

inspired by Olympia Demetropoulos, Kevin Zhu, & Esther Sun of 2020 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective Cohort 2

When the sky fell into the sea, you buried your face into mine & I 

wept until we dyed our hands the loneliest blue. Afterward, no fairytale could 

soothe you to sleep so I stopped telling them. In our dreams, there was never 

a family warm enough to hold, so you curled into my arms, longing to find 

any promise of skin not yet bruised, anything to ward off the 

living ghosts we have become. One day, you will laugh again, but right 

now, the future beckons us, its early light blinding the way 

I have always taught you to welcome the sun—with eyes open wide to 

the east, where new stories begin. So throw back the drapes & tell 

me what you see. There are shimmering stars in the sea where you

once wished for fish & fish in the sky where you first caught flight. Have 

no fear. No matter what disaster wrings from us, I will draw you

every happiness, let their watercolors run like piano music noticed

only by the echoes of lost hours. We’ll paint every childhood memory I

saved with blurred palettes of stolen possibility: all the places we could have 

wandered, forever submerged in past tense. What I wouldn’t sacrifice to have been 

back in our former life. Everything we treasured: disappeared in mist, gone

with time’s flickering fireflies. Have you wondered about fate? Because 

you chose shelter over surrender, we slipped silent into this second life & I—

I helped destiny bare the soft flesh of its stomach. When we left 

the coldest side of the moon, you took survival as a souvenir, hid it behind 

a galaxy of rubble & ruin. Later, on the shores of midnight, we struck the 

matches for a new day. I’ll never forget the way you whispered Let’s go home,

your fragile voice humming a familiar melody, the same song that 

coaxed the shyest of wallflowers into blooming. From birth you

knew I had to exit first. It is as the scriptures foretold: we are made 

from dust & to dust we shall return. So sleep tight & wait for me

in the chambers of a forgotten morning. Patience was never your forte but 

you must be brave. Every fairytale unspools a thread of fate, an I-

Ching hexagram divining the distances before dusk. In this last will 

& testament, I name you the heiress to all the light we refused to carry.

There is no more ocean, but there is still Ocean Vuong’s light: our first fairytale. So use it. 

Use it to rebuild the outstretched sky, the bottomless sea. Use it to prove we were alive, all along.