ALLISON ZHANG

The Year I Learned to Button My Shirt From the Inside

At thirteen, I practiced dressing like a boy
in the furnace room, where the floor sweated
and the air smelled like old pennies.
I stole my father’s shirts—
the ones he didn’t wear to weddings,
but to change the oil or fix the gutters.

The first time I wore one inside-out,
I panicked at the buttons:
slippery, backward, disobedient.
So I twisted my arms like vines,
tugged the cuffs with my teeth,
and taught myself a way in. 

My mother saw the shirts missing,
never asked. Just left a pile of clean laundry
on my bed, a dare
I didn’t know how to answer.

At school, I avoided photos.
Used my backpack straps as armor.
When someone called me pretty,
I swallowed it like sour milk—
fast, and without apology.

I kept a shoebox under the bed
full of rubber bands and receipts.
Things that bent but never broke.

Once, I fell asleep wearing
three shirts at once.
Dreamed of walking into a pond
and coming out with different shoulders.

Now, I dress in the dark.
Thumb the buttons from behind the fabric.
And when someone says girl,
I check if they’re talking to me
or the shirt I’m still trying to grow into. 

What My Mother Calls Hunger

My mother says I eat
like I’m hiding something.

She ladles soup
into a bowl so thin
you can see the ghosts
of chrysanthemums beneath it.

I say I’m full.
She says, again?

In Mandarin,
the word for full—饱—
shares a root
with the word for satisfied.
She taps her chopsticks
against her palm,
counting something
that isn’t there.

The duck glistens.
The skin glows like lacquer.
I count the slices
the way I count bones
in the mirror.
I leave mine untouched.

She says:
At your age I was thin
because we had no choice.
You’re thin
because you want to be
a question no one asks.

Once, I chewed a dumpling
and spit it into a napkin
when she turned to rinse the sink.
When she found it,
she said:
You are wasting history.

I wanted to say:
I am history.
Look at my ribs—
a ruin made clean.

Instead I said sorry.
She put her hand
on the back of my neck
like she was checking
for a fever
or proof I was still here.

She fed me a sliver of apple
with her own hands.

I chewed.
I swallowed.
It stayed.

The Softer Half

At the wake, we passed 
slices of orange in our palms. No one spoke.
Your mother pressed garlic behind each window.

Later, you showed me
your father’s shoes lined in the hall—
polished that morning,
though no one would wear them.

We sat by the sink and washed rice, 
as if rinsing grief down the drain.
Outside, your brother scraped
moss from the stone steps with a spoon.
He didn’t stop until the metal bent.

There was a pot of broth left on the stove,
uncovered. We watched it grow cold.

You said nothing,
but you peeled a pear
and gave me the softer half.

It tasted like something that had waited
a long time to be eaten.

Mass and Memory

My aunt believes weight
is a map: every ounce
an address I’ve visited
and stayed too long.

She points to the soft armor
on my back, says it grew
from nights I pressed myself
into corners, wanting
angles to remember me.

I try explaining how weight
feels closer to weather—
how it pools in the hollows
behind my knees,
gathers like thunderheads
above my clavicles.

I’ve carried winter
even in August,
a quiet, deliberate density,
as if my marrow
learned to salt itself
against absence.

My aunt doesn’t understand
how a body sometimes
wants enough density
to cast a shadow
on something real.

Once, a doctor
described my shape
as irregular terrain,
like I was a mountain
someone might measure
by barometric pressure.

But I’ve grown fond
of the way my body
holds storms and still
roots itself—stubborn
as a spruce splitting rock.

I want to believe
there’s no shame
in a form that can survive
its own gravity.

Allison Zhang is a writer and editor based in Los Angeles. An immigrant and bilingual speaker of English and Mandarin, she writes about language, memory, and quiet forms of survival. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Pithead Chapel, Vagabond City Lit, SWWIM Every Day, Eunoia Review, and Stone Circle Review, among others. She is the author of An Everlasting Bond, honored by the BookFest Spring Awards.