Cynthia Dewi Oka
Imagining My Mother Imagining Me
We rocked the years in our arms. Waiting
became our weather. One after another, we
buried the stillborn rubies warm with my blood
in the dusty yard. We had to dig deep, beyond
the saliva of dogs, famished, roaming the streets
in packs. I couldn’t even sweep the floor without
them falling out of me. Can you imagine? I was
a patch of duct tape. We didn’t have a gate
then. Only God. We tried and tried again.
The doctor blamed the stray cats of my girl-
hood. The ones I saved from my mother’s blade.
She was tired from ten children and islands
growing on her knees that made her walk
slow, mind cruel. The doctor said cat filth made
my womb weak. I wept into their furs. I called
them Mama. There had been so much pain. I
wanted to be a livable place. The fourth pregnancy,
I laid on my back for months, terrified of my own
vibrations. Every day after work, my husband
carried me naked to the tub like a Tang Dynasty
urn. Washed my milk-swollen breasts, my shut
orchid cunt. That was when I knew I could
learn to love him. Of course, I had thought about
leaving. Wives without escape plans are sweet
as ripe durian, and just as dumb. Have you ever
concentrated all your energy on doing nothing?
The ceiling became my memoir, each leak-stain
a cathartic point in the plot. Look, directly above,
the last time I sang on stage in a tube of light
before they closed the Chinese language schools.
And in the far-left corner, my father’s flexed jaw
to which ash from the old house clung. Cling
to me like that, little one. I think heaven must be
dull with no one ever raising their voice. The house
being clean without my human intervention. My
bloated face floating on a silver tray under the dishes
arriving at seven, twelve, six on the dot. Then one
day, while the earth moved imperceptibly
around its own rod, I felt my low back unlatch. I
was stronger than God facing the water at the start
of everything. He must have trembled. She
rammed me from the inside out and my whole
history was a held note in falsetto. I saw her
future in the drops of sweat that rippled the surface
of my eyes. She would be the top of her class. Wear
only the best imported clothes from Japan, Singapore,
Italy. Move like melting glass through the world,
armored by petals and the thinking of stars. She’d
know the whole book of Psalms by heart. Sing
as I once did, but with all the doors thrown open.
Be fluent in every imperial language but loss.
When she finally settled on my breast, the sun was
at its zenith. A dimness in my heart: she was the color
of polluted sand. Later, my husband’s mother, red
Valentinos clicking on the bleached hospital tiles,
stitched her brow as she ran a thumb across my new
daughter’s brow, as though wiping off a stain.
The Heart Is Also a Lion’s Mouth
meaning when its canines sink into its prey’s neck,
the weaker animal must resort to thinly breathing,
stringing through the narrow, pink tubes of its nose
oxygen like needle and thread across starved
boulders of meat and muscle—a composition of
danger, which, if I am honest, is the only true source
of dignity I have ever been able to recognize, under
all that yellow fur rippling, reminiscent of victory
ribbons in this or that, the grasses of childhood
where my parents planted their eyes like dark yams.
I was watched, and learned to watch, myself, in
the way I have already here confused a heart
for a mouth, a mouth for a predator that cannot eat
its way out of captivity, loss of its share of the earth,
becoming a crown nailed to ambition’s wall. They wanted
only what was perfect for me, meaning, perfection
of me: a synecdoche. I, too, am guilty of this reduction,
for example, that anyone be my father’s arm around
my shoulders in the pupil’s oblivious theater, or
Mufasa, leaping out of the flood of terror-stricken
hooves to snatch with his teeth that which he prizes
most in his world of dust. That abandonment be
the branch that snaps. The strings swell and I am
nine again, choking on my father’s skin like air.
Someday I will learn to tell the difference between
shrinking and loving. Before I loosen my jaw
around the syllables that slide, limp, antelope of my life
in digestible pieces now, stripped of its coat. Isn’t this
what language is for? To let go, to keep letting go, to
preserve of the heart something of the heart.