self-portrait as a mirage

it’s a girl has never been a bold statement,
but a husk of dawn the skyline knows a bullet quivers to
as if everything had a fear of death.

maybe that is more comforting
than how nothing is ever quiet enough
to leave the world untouched

i was planned in the year of the rabbit, leaving paw prints on the moon
when mother prayed to a universe full of stars for an only son so thunderously,
and the sun didn’t even notice for eight minutes.

when i hold a pair of chopsticks like a pencil,
pretending i have a sense of touch with my words
as a poet who learns by ear,

maybe it is easier to deduce
myself to a chemical reaction, twin chromosomes,
but a pinball machine is all skill, a talk of rituals.

i will count static as a presence that fills
an ocean that has never really been empty to begin with, as i bear
just enough visual weight to be worth listening to

with every conversation stealing my name, the syllables uncurving
for a unruined body until i become a liminal space existing
to make room as the daughter of a mother who won.

then the sound of rust can escape this generation
as a sakura that was the first to bloom like the petals of a girl’s dress,
uncorking like dandelion seeds at birth

that fall more like paper parachutes,
the tightropes thinning in the violence of flight, trying
to go home so raw that my footsteps soften the floorboards asleep.

but it is all inertia. untangling the damage,
i let the breakage out like eggshells,
belonging again

as the woman in me that can grow up to be someone’s daughter,
my last name crumpling from the slaughterhouse,
unfolded into a bowl that has never been empty enough.