repentance

i. eden

it takes seven years for me to go home.

it is strange to think i have blood on chinese soil

when every breath i take, word i speak is so easily, simply american.

still, my grandmother loves me as her own.

i cross perpetually rush-hour streets tucked into her side,

let her soft murmurings in an alien tongue fly over my head.

she buys me a stuffed panda at the zoo,

watches my impromptu dance routines on a wide windowsill.

aiya, tell her to get down from there, says my mother. she’ll fall.

oh, but look how happy she is, my grandmother says, and claps as i bow.

ii. lucifer

i learn of the news through my mother,

because it is only properly devastating in a familiar language.

cancer. like what dad studies.

when will she get better?

a splintered smile. the force of it must press on her tongue, but my mother bites

it down. soon, she says, and only now do i wonder

how much those words had burned.

iii. sin

i have another treatment tomorrow.

does it hurt?

a little. don’t worry too much about me.

my mother’s fingers dig into my forearm, but i wiggle out of her grip,

take the stairs two at a time until i have shaken off

the remnants of a stilted conversation,

clunky small talk that falls flat between screens.

ah, where did she go?

tell her i love her.

iv. confession

she dies on a school morning, and i cry for thirty minutes,

more from shock than anything else.

god, i wished i had let screams ravage my throat then,

tears stain the corners of my eyelids and trace scars into my cheeks,

god, why didn’t it burn the way it was supposed to,

searing vengeance into the lines of my sorry existence?

god, you have to understand why i couldn’t ever say i love you back

or maybe i need to find a better reason, because i hid

from the clumsiness of mismatched languages

until i realized it had fallen on someone else instead.

god, how do i tell her everything i could never,

i love you, i love you, i love you,

god, if i sat in a confessional, would you turn me away?

v. sacrilege

it has been four years, and i still hate the way i watch for my mother’s flinch

when my grandmother's name is spoken,

like the syllables in english-tainted chinese would wither

as it left my lips. she is a scar

of memory, a phantom pain i have never let myself feel.

i used to pray to god that she’d live.

now, my only prayers are broken apologies,

not enough, not enough, not enough.