Morning

Sophia Liu

A slow drive into red haze. The best of this town is in its smoke screens,
its unassimilable tongues, its quiet men on the fishing dock

who would never kill a thing. Mama dresses my nightstand in ginger tea and honeydew,
empty gifts for a daughter who can’t help but crave the execution of a Dream.

Two summers later, when we are a hundred towns apart, Mama plans
to withdraw her footsteps from the house she scaffolded and sleep beside her own mother

until she wakes up alone. The final falling of a life withheld of girlhood.
If survival is her doe-eyed dream, then how would she define dying. Then how am I

to make anything from my mother’s blue-bordered vestige. Anything
from a country who spelled same with an extra h. Maybe love,

like everything, is a single word, an attempt to take up time.
A museum of half-towns and pillaged promises.

The best I can dream up is the drumming of the divine rain when
I’m no longer here to hear it. The fields of buttercups that form themselves into bouquets.

The forsythia that dedifferentiate from their graves. The mothers who love us
intolerably, dusting our blankets for when we come home.

Sophia Liu is a writer and multidisciplinary artist. The author of the poetry chapbook There Is No Happy Ending (New Rivers Press 2023), her work appears in Frontier Poetry, Puerto del Sol, AAWW: The Margins, Muzzle, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. She studies Cognitive Science at Yale College.