Confession
Hongling Luo, 2012
Moonlight, like grief, is unanswerable.
Unfurling in the quilted borders of spring.
Love is only love when the darkness dims
and his face is still there, fixed as a distant star to sea.
There is no horizon. I fold myself over his mouth
and choke fentanyl between shifts. I am
stained by this war. I am folding headfirst
into swan. Always touching out of necessity.
Always forgetting where bodies end
and gravity begins, how the crimson scattered across his back
is just the illusion of light. The womb just
another place to hide.
In the scene where my husband goes to confession
He destroys it all: striking, burning, drowning.
You see he knew our promises were made of flesh
they couldn’t last very long.
Staring at the flames
where the Acropolis once stood.
So high it hurts.
My Mother Teaches Me How to Prepare Fish
I.
Yesterday I hand you slicked-back scale,
white underbelly, soft and ripening,
and you taught me how to hold a body
close, sheathe its cruelty, wrap it in
devotion. To hold the knife before
the cut, like a breath release and yes, there,
do you see?
II.
There is no room for loss here,
these memories of homeland
you’ve folded like fresh linen
and tossed into laundry machines
in square apartments, and now
they resemble washed-up denim.
You promised to never recall our
last life, the one where you were
the girl with the red mouth open
like a blood-moon. But we know
memories are only ghosts not yet
forgotten. That oath is still on the
cutting board, swollen and pink.
Still gasping. Still asking to be made
whole and kept.
III.
Draw breath before the
final cut. Prayers slit open like
underbelly. Recall its life, you say:
flash of scale, glorious sea, and
the kiss of sand. This creature
does not belong here, trapped
beneath my butcher’s knife. I
am trapped with it.
This country was never mine.
This water was never this
bright, never this cold.
How it devours.
IV.
Here, the tongues fold over
your closing mouth. Pa believes
words are the key to assimilation,
so we choke on syllables
between shifts. He does
not know language is a calculus:
the sum of its smallest parts.
You slice the head clean off.
