Prose Portfolio

“That Which Catches Light” has advanced past the school and district stages of the National PTA Reflections competition.

“if i am with you” earned second place in the international Confessions Literature Confess 2025 competition with the subject “the distance between us”.

An unreleased poem, “In the Fire, I Belong” has been accepted for publication in The Minnesota Review, a Duke University Press journal of critical and creative writing, forthcoming in issue 107.

That Which Catches Light

Dark flecks drift into the wind;
ravens scattering against a pale sky
a sky bruised raw
by thoughts unspoken.

Raindrops wander on fractured glass,
uncertain where we’ll meet
or when we’ll fall.

I have been the shattered thing:
shivering on cold stone,
left in pieces beneath
the weight of my own dreaming.

A constellation of mistakes:
wants and needs
glittering like fallen stars.

I have burned that way.
But fire, bolder than I, taught
how to rise,
still flickering,
and hold close what glows.

So I gathered all the blaze spared:
singed edges, crooked hopes,
trembling shards
that remembered light.

I stacked them, stone on stone,
and though the seams still show,
I called it a beginning.

And I—
I am not whole,
but held.
Suspended in the ache
between what was and what longs to be.

Because
a leaf remembers the tree,
a spark remembers the flame,
I remember the world
that razed and remade me.

So here I belong.
In the trying,
in the fragments,
in the hands that rebuild.

To live
is to keep becoming.
To lift again and again
from the ashes of almosts.

If I am but one shard
in all this fractured glass,
then let me be the piece
that catches light.

That remembers the sky
even
as
it
fell.

Written by Mason Lai, a California high schooler. I hope you felt something when you read this.

therealmasonlai's avatar by therealmasonlai

if i am with you

days fold inward upon each other,

imploding yet exploding; incomplete and fragmented.

seen but not felt;

whirling,

raging,

but – if i am with you,

sunlight slips through the trees

and leads the dance of silhouettes across the soil.

it is golden –

like you

and your voice

uprooting doubt,

silencing the muttering leaves above.

the soul speaks

a thousand words –

yet the voice captures so little

while the rest are lost

to infinity.

even so,

i feel you;

your ebb and flow.

but when the wind dies

and the trees are still,

the last echoes of eden fade

to shadow.

the sun sets

ever so softly;

rainbow ink

spilling upward into the heavens.

cue the obsidian drapes falling over the canvas,

as lofty ideals

subside to cold repose

but the light has not left yet.

with you,

the soft pinholes in the sky open up

and the stars sigh.

therealmasonlai's avatar by therealmasonlai