“Drowning Simulations” by Peihe Feng

Drowning Simulations

And in the darkened underpass I thought ‘oh god my chance has come at last’/but then a strange fear gripped me/and I just couldn’t ask

John: we never should have left that underpass, your hand

on my knee, your teeth in my wrists. i would never have knew

in the dark, time flows differently, winding re-winding winding

into the strings you left on my bedroom floor, i cut my fingers 

bloody with them when you were looking away, saying K, hear this ––

before pressing your mouth to the red slit, pretending,

ignoring, as if you were not pulling the thing out of my body with 

your canine. could you please drive me back into that

underpass now, John? so i may retrieve

the spare keys and mail them to your house, coffined in 

an unaddressed envelope and shrouded by tissue papers, your house

that looks exactly like my childhood home, the first place I’ve ever been to

in your car. your car where your wife’s lashes and glossed lips 

hang permanently in the mirror above us, she who wears

her wedding veil and black dress to check the mail

smiling behind every window. and you are driving me back to that underpass again, the only place 

so dark and indefinite that we could simulate drowning,

you sit behind your sunglasses as i bury my hands into the unknown, fishing

for the jacket you left at midnight on a chair in my 

kitchen. i stared at it for hours in the morning and saw you 

sitting across the breakfast table, me with lashes and glossed lips and veils and a black dress. i dreamed of driving and flying and drowning again, John.

at daybreak dreams feel vaguer than the past and i can’t even tell if its

you.

This piece was previously published in Rundelania in November 2024.

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Peihe Feng is a student from Guangzhou, China. She writes for her school's journal and gardens on her balcony in her spare time. She has published a collection of her writings in Chinese, and her English poems have been recognized by Princeton University.