Motherlode
Isabella Jiang
Cresskill, NJ
Cresskill High School
Poetry
i.
Willed prior
to a corner of their minds, rice arrived
like snow: bright,
by June capsules bitter
to stomach. And so rough
when seized with sooted hands,
that great-Aunt writhed
upright in her cot, then lurched
back into slumber. That night,
she would sleep
beneath their field, the milky gut
swollen with pearls.
ii.
Within days I kill the myna,
the birch, the yucca
for I still don’t know
to reap.
iii.
The rust,
the blood mingled into one
in the alleyway—moon
low then,
at the birthplace of five pups. Ma,
one who’d stoop
for angelicas, find fish
to feed the mouth of a river,
bore two home.
iv.
Twilight, when working lamps
were scarce,
forms that tensed
their backs like boys crept
up the road. For days,
for hungry dogs whose skin
would nourish men,
she wept.
v.
Set in soft hands,
here are two I am first
to mother: the sapling
curved like my great-Aunt’s
fingers, the myna bird
murmuring itself to sleep. On
it slumbers, as if enclosed
in a damp glove,
while Ma guts a melon
in the light of dawn.
ELOGIO EDITORIAL
There is a cubist aesthetic to this poem. The fragmented images rendered here in poetry bring light into a broken reality.
Isabella Jiang ('20) is a student at Cresskill High School in Cresskill, NJ. Her work has previously been nominated for The Best Small Fictions and recognized by The Poetry Society, Hollins University, The National Federation of State Poetry Societies, The Growing Stage, and elsewhere. She edits for Sandpiper, Opus, and HerCulture.
SOBRE O AUTOR