Conversation with Max, April 2020

I am in my room, he in his, our gemini miseries roping

between us. Not a single 10 minutes passes without me

hearing an ambulance or two anymore, he says.

Weill Cornell, HSS, and Lenox Hill are all close to me.

I pause, remembering…

… Lenox, that tall black clock I have driven by countlessly.

My grandmother before her death.

I was born there, he observes. Oh, what irony, I am

tempted to say, what irony, this whole halo of

birth and death and the ambulances driving

back and forth, delivery trucks between here and there

and us, twenty some buildings apart, twin

mournful quietudes rising in the air to join the

dove calls and grief songs and those keen, insisting sirens.

Rachel Zhu lives in New York and is currently a junior at Horace Mann School. She is the cofounder and Editor in Chief of Horace Mann’s creative prose magazine, LitMag. Outside of school, Zhu writes creative short prose and poetry, and is also an artist and ceramicist. She draws influence from her Chinese background and culture as well as classical European and American works of literature. Through her work, she hopes to inspire other Asian Americans to express their stories and experiences through the world of humanities and art. Zhu has work published or forthcoming in Blue Marble, Lily Poetry Review, Girls Write the World, and Ginosko.