JULIA GAY
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persimmon (feat. Eric Tu)

11/10/2016

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Dust particles murmur wishes in my ear
Turn violet in the heat

The way the season turns leaves
As they fall like paper scraps
And pile above the base of trees

My roots drill deeper today
Lines in my palm sharper than usual
Tell me I was born from the valleys of mountains

And floated past trees by streams
And streams of trees
As they grow into the full sky
The way stories on the back of photographs
Fill my empty curiosity less incomplete

Voices of my great grandparents
Lift me out the front door
Lilting echoes
A chorus of birds
Their melodies intoxicating
Like a cube of sugar on the tongue
I’ve heard this song before

The notes play as it rains rivers of leaves
There’s something sentimental about disconnection
Just look at my roots
Look at my notebooks
Whose covers fade in color
Look at these leaves
Separated from the branches they called home
But they’ll never touch home
The way my third world nostalgia

Itches on the tips of my fingers
Yearning to pluck China from the tree
Taste her sweet fruit in my mouth

These hand-cut persimmons
Leave a bittersweet aftertaste
I reach with my arms outstretched
Just inches away
Just in case fallen leaves need validation
That roots are always close

(*Eric's lines are italicized.)
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honey (feat. Eric Tu)

11/10/2016

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The honey is bitter this morning

I wake up and say all the left words
Counterclockwise


Sweetness heavy on my tongue

I let the beat dissolve
Like these grains melt in the sun


Gratitude that night dissolved
When I slipped through dream’s fingers

Sieving out of love and out of season
All’s in order out of sequence


I look out the window and a bird flies by
I look back to yesterday and a year’s gone by

I’ve spent time underground and off air
Online and in-print
On-stage and in blogs
Counting days
Like they hold some kind of promise
My fingers crossed


It’s Tuesday
And I’m waist deep in myself

Today, I stand not just knee deep
In break beats with an old soul


Bones drumming on book pages
Splintered with coffee stains

My words live in black ink
My body decomposes in the white space
In this composition of colors
The voices of the counter-culture
Too shy to speak loud


(*Eric's lines are italicized.)
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red

11/6/2016

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he whistles
shouts “hermoooosa”
shouts “china”
shouts “sexy”

his words 
dripping with longing
scramble out his throat and under my skin
they nestle, unwelcome
behind my ears
at the nape of my neck
between my breasts

I want to stare daggers at him
I want to throw daggers at him
picture his body skewered with knives
streams of blood pouring out
leaving puddles of red
a deep, vibrant red 
a shimmering red
a sexy red

but the only rushing blood is flooding to my cheeks
the only vibrant red is bursting from the sun
The sun, real heavy to the ground
my head’s real heavy to the ground

and I think to myself,

my skirt wasn’t this short when I left the house
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    my poetry

    tells a story of a baby girl born in the sunsets of Ganzhou, raised among the steel mills of Cleveland and surviving in a world that pinches hard at her wind pipes.

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