Three Poems
Killings
bà ba
were these my first words or
did I
call out mā ma before anything else
bà ba
I never told you I drank up
your bottle
of stashed away bái jiǔ at home
or hid
your gas cigarette lighters
for fun
and for a primal desire to entertain
what can
destroy but you thought I
smoked
and pulled me aside to say gū niáng
they can
give you cancer while you
reeked of
burnt tar and your teeth yellowing
the smell
of tobacco bleeding into
your fingers
Now that you’re half-dead I couldn’t
tell if
you meant what you said
or if
it was all an artifice meant to trick
me and
no one else
Regardless
it was a pretty lie like the ones I tell
you here
next to your flailing head
promises
of springs and finely aged bái jiǔ
like they
don’t kill anymore
The Middle of Me Sank Like the Atlantic
Last night I wiped the mirror with the Atlantic
dipped it in the receding currents
of the Northeast coast
and bused it home with me
It can be lethal—my mother has a scar
on her under-eye from a broken shard
the wound was so deep that I could fall off its edge
twist my spine and have my throat cut
by a protruding rock before I reach the bottom
But its throat-slitting gaze soothes me
when it gashes reality open and slips a lie in
and tells me I’m prettier than I am
and gives my right cheek a mole
because I couldn’t wash off a splotch on it
美人痣, my mother calls it, a beauty mark
too bad you don’t have one, she sighed
and showed me pictures of ugly men
asking me to imagine a sex life with them
I used to walk away; but I’ve learned
to picture it: me on top of a dead man
as my mother barges in and my mirror watches me
watch my reflection in it
scarlet and naked
I picture what she would do
she’d wipe the blood off my reflection
bag the body and dump it in the Atlantic
before finding me another man
hoping I could still be what she wanted
Mother, oh, mother
you knew years ago I couldn’t be that
years ago when I let out my first cry
and you saw that my groin divided and sank
like the lapping Atlantic
where the Pangaea split apart at
I grew up afraid of the sea because you said it swallows
it’ll lull and envelop me till I’m made of water
now, on the bus, with my hands still glossy from the Atlantic
and the mirror still wet, I realized you were right
I am of water
and of blood and the Atlantic
and I sink, but only to envelop myself
S. Chen is a bilingual poet living in Boston. Her writing can be found in the New York Times’ The Learning Network, Merion West, Motto (China), and Amethyst Review, among other places. In her free time, she tends to her plants, visits cat cafes, and indulges in some mint chocolate chip ice cream.
