Wolfberries then, and the wood ears
bobbing like little buoys along your
tongue. The bruised fruits tempting
you. Open sesame. The scene unfolds
like a cold open from a cancelled
soap opera. Baby teeth tumbling out
laundried, lost cause from keeping
time, and your mother upright as a
veteran ginkgo, scooping the white
back into your bowl. These scraps
of love shoved down your bomb
sheltered throat. This rice–ripened
steam rising past you like ghosts
through walls. Years. How efficient
it must be to live and never be seen.
The God your mother believes in
floats on your spoon like a voyeur
or belly–up corpse searching for
a faucet to leak from. Odd, how
absence announces its entrance
with the brute force of dead ends.
Once, your mother drove into the
mausoleum of God and found you
with a boyfriend knee deep in burnt
glory, the light refracting as a knife
twist. The violent kiss like an expert
diver accelerating towards the water.
Blue foreskin, blind faith. The kind
you need to place candles inside paper
lanterns. To watch them pass from
this life into the next. Tiny miracles
of ash. You pause for a later ending.
Ladle the pork wontons from the
pot and into your mouth. Into your
mother heavy as proof. Her chopsticks
flat across the bowl’s rim. Laid out like
white flags. The way oars float even
after everything else has sunk. Because
funerals are really for the living. Because
love, she says, is bright failure, and your
heart was never the lotus but the ocean
compromised by light. When God
moved in through the flickering water
over the promise of years. Like a slow
cooked soup. How your mother moves
in slow motion now. Without a compass
or hourglass, distance becomes a home.