Vikki C. – [For The Untitled Ones]

As if it matters on this humid evening, curling my hair

against its will to resist common ground while the pretty ones

live the straight path to heaven.  I’d step out the portrait

if it meant the rest could heal, return small, via some aperture,

slip into my mother’s body — the needle conveniently lost.

Say it is not a wound but some mistaken blessing.

You know, how a dress frays quietly until its fibres

fall in piles of glitter. It is that abandoned language

that bites its own lip before tongues ever spoke.

The pill they swallow when war becomes too much.

How would I know the scent of jasmine

if not for drifting between mountains?

The local variety blooms after dark, when it's easier

to love what you cannot see.

In Chinese, the word for mother sounds similar

to the interrogative at the end of a question.

When the air is thick with warm, white petals,

I lie down in the tangled gauze of backstories,

where all my ancestors fit like babies inside my womb

— even the traitors.

It’s in this dream, I stop asking.