On a bed as white as fresh cooked rice, my mother lays alone. Doctors and nurses mill around the room saying, sciatic nerve, blood clot, unilateral paresis—they settle on undiagnosable. My mother says, Don’t give me no medicine. Don’t y’all know how to pray? He is preying on your mother, pastor warns. A woman who can see visions in her dreams, best believe the Enemy wants her culled. She hadn’t called for 3 days. Palpitations in my chest, something was up. The full moon is an Excedrin without water. 1 sheep. No sheep. Finally fall asleep to ASMR, wake to commercials asking どっかいきたくない？I have google flight alerts for NYC. I have a savings and it’s dying to be spent. I oil my face, between my cornrows; rub the ashy from between my fingers; sing Sometimes I Feel Like a [ ] Child. She texts, Don’t worry, just war. I wear worry like acne. When we FaceTime, she asks, Ain’t I supposed to be the one sick?
Inspired by the dark humor of Oyakodon, a Japanese chicken egg dish which translates as “parent & child bowl,” I wrote a poem series that explores death’s role in my relationship with my mother. Written while she was in the hospital, I found language to be the only way to mitigate my powerlessness. Even if I wasn’t in control, I wanted to at least have a grasp on my internal life.
"But—and here’s the thing—social media is not a small back room, even in the realm of poetry. Social media gathers enough poets into one place that the interactions that occur no longer possess the intimacy and provisionality of the small back room."
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"I try to develop a vision of the poem as a crystalline structure, to see the points, often images or nouns, in the structure, to see the energies, sometimes prepositional, sometimes sonic, sometimes emotional, that travel between and among these points in the text, and to consider the way the light of our attention might play on and activate the multifarious connections."
