Abdication
At first I think of postage stamps
or the faces of queens, immortalized
in their black-and-white moment—
shades of the past marred
only by an accidental fold, some streak
of pale lightning. Pink roses blooming
on the wallpaper of my bedside dresser, and
a photo pinched between plump fingers.
Squinting at its subject I find
a child. Younger than I, somehow:
roundcheeked in a stiff-collared dress,
lips peeled back in perpetuity—
Smiling what we would call a shuaya smile,
she “brushes teeth” to appease some ghost
hidden behind the lens.
(Her own mother, as it turns out).
Her eyes are dark and wide. In her entirety
my mother is barely larger than
my thumbnail.
(I am eight years old). Here are things that surely
must always have existed as they are now:
Mars. Stonehenge. Everest.
The swelling of the seven seas.
The gnarled roots of redwoods, reaching
deep through the soil of the earth.
Our unfathomable mothers.
When she tells me of my grandmother
witch, who sent her away at two, expecting
love at six, and then a smile flashed
for the future too, I cannot help
but shrink away from the unframed tears,
saying Bu xiang can le.
I don’t want to see. Burying myself
in the legos on the carpet, and the photo
underneath the socks in the top drawer,
floral and pink.
Yet on some nights,
when the moonlight streams through
my window slats like tiger stripes,
slinking slow across the ceiling, something
brings me to rummage out the past,
to gaze back at this face younger
and more vulnerable than mine, yet somehow
still sleeping in the room right beside me.
I’d watched The Princess Diaries, and pawed
through my mother’s things, seeking
my inheritance: perhaps the heirloom gems
of royalty, or an alternate path
towards nobility: “You were adopted!”
Not this girl-child ghost.
My mother tells me that she knew, at ten, that
her daughter would be a princess.
(Time passes). Though it is often
in the nature of things to follow
patterns, for branches to twist onwards
as tangled as the buried roots,
my mother does not curse me
with her inheritance: no imprint
of a (grand)mother who had chosen
favorites—was it gender?—or withheld
love. Were I her, could I too have
hacked a clean cut at the past?
Loved a usurper, some new brother
like my own future children?
Transmuted my blood into garnets at
each birth, each joyful coronation? Never
did she have her own ceremony:
my mother the perpetual chauffeur
of all these other lives, embracing us
in hands sheathed by dishwater cracks.
Myself a backseat passenger—for many years
I averted my gaze, focused on the scenery
flashing beyond the window.
(Today I am twenty six). Older
than the not-crying child in the photo,
older than her mother when her mother had her, nearly
older than the mother she herself would become
upon having my older brother
in this far and foreign land. The beautiful country.
Now my mother’s hair silvers
like ash at the roots.
When we hug and she says that
I am her dream, born into being, I wonder
if it is too late to throw down my crown.
This poem was written for the CCSF Introductory Poetry class in Spring 2020.