Someday my mother will die
By Jenny Chu
& it is after preemptive grief this poem is eulogized & after her my father will & after their
breaths the lives I have lived will ebb away too. Water will peel away the paler knolls & leave
nothing but fuel for poetry. Its recipe being grief & salted lakes & a lovely city. We once visited
rural Utah & my mother still talks about the ruffled bears her friends saw as if she, too, had
melted into miles of forest. Three months later, the forest caught on fire & my mother broke an
orange bowl, the porcelain dripping off her pale hands. My mother hates cremation, hates the
thought of her heart crashing before her soul, but she loves this black-haired dream that she has
been promised & I have not yet given her. She will be buried near the sea, near the tides that
never stopped sobbing since she arrived in ‘90s San Francisco. Dirt & crabs caked around her
blossoming nails. After I’ve done the math, I will stop biting my nails & I will sit cross-legged
on hills I used to die on. I will continue listening to the Christian radio she loved & I hated but
loved because I love her. See? That wasn’t so hard to say, I’ll tell myself, the six songs rotating
with a drivers’ wheel, skedaddling around loss. She love[s/d] that word, that age-old movement
of the lips. God, it’s strange how quick a tense can change a moment. It’s been 20 years since she
hugged her best friend. It’s been 2 years since I wrote a poem about love. Dancing, we all sink
into a body: these cold-blooded memories. I am writing this poem at home & my mother is
working as an accountant. Somehow, this feels wrong. In this one, red-bricked, nearly
unshakeable home.
Jenny Chu (she/her) is a Chinese-American poet from Dallas, Texas. The founder and editor in chief of Rosetta Lit, her poetry has been nationally recognized by YoungArts and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers. She tries to make the world a better place for some definition of better.
Artwork Source: “San Mateo County, California (Coast),” Minor White. From the Public Domain.
The Turning Leaf Journal 