motherhood dichotomy

Sandra Lin, United States

& how to break open my mouth: the spindles of your
hand reclaiming my hair. & what you
are saying is that your love is a sacrifice of
your body. what, then, is left for me to repay? all I have
left are the halves of an eye in each
socket & even then, they are mine only 50% of
the time. every deranged person denies instability;
you hammer a fist against your own
head. I’m going crazy, I’m going crazy. in a
dream, all my hair fell out, uprooted like cheap wildflowers.
in an alternate universe, you dropped me on the
bed instead, my small body softening the mattress.
you pinch my ear & yank & maybe you are just a humanized
high-pressure pot, primed to explode in any dimension.
I turn transparent with each rainstorm, flickering with death.

& the way love transforms animal to paperweight to ghost,
always giving & almost complete. & how my first
home was inside you & I gleaned you clean of anything
worth keeping, emptied you with larceny
like a house without alarms. why, then, do I find it
impossible to believe? that in starvation, so many i-mas* gut
themselves to feed mouths; you prefer the skeleton
to every cut of fish. do you want more? out the
window, a plane comets through the azurite & I wish for
possibility. in an alternate universe, you
removed me from your womb instead, returned your
body to yourself. you coax my hair into a ponytail & maybe that’s
the only way you know to show gentleness, wizened by
the countryside until you become a mussel, tough-skinned.
I turn resin in each amber star, light-permeable, honeyed.

nothing is connected, not 莲藕**, not my umbilical cord. we are only doing so much better.

* i-ma: "mother" in Fuzhounese

** 莲藕 (lian ou): "lotus root" in Mandarin. In Chinese, there's an idiom (藕断丝连; ou duan si lian) that describes how things might be severed but still be connected through depiction of how when you break a lotus root in half, the sticky threads still connect the pieces.

Sandra Lin (林诺晨) is a Chinese American from New York who currently attends Bell High School in Florida. She likes to watch C-dramas and wants a black kitten very badly. She may be contacted on Instagram @sandranuochen.