Everything that grows is foreign

Iris Cai

This poem first appeared in the 2024 YoungArts contributor anthology.

Between the sky and our four green walls,
light is the only tenant that knows how to leave. 

Better for you to live a small life, my mother repeats.
Small enough, thin between the louver blinds,

my absence cast in rows on the popcorn
ceiling. Today, we watch afternoon linger

in every photograph, our hair the same washed-out red.
When apologies are too big for us to hold, I try 

to think about how I was once just a cell in her body,
and the poetry she must have swallowed for me. 

My mother worries I left her for dried ink, an age-old lie.
Yet all I am is her. We are both thinking about 

how we used to tease each other’s pronunciations, 
dictionary pages soft with summer rain. 

How we fell asleep to the lull of the cicadas, minutes 
loose like baby teeth. We were force-fed 

enough until it grew bigger than we could ever be. 
Until I grew into a series of unfinished dreams: 

scrapbook poems, wilted plane tickets. Side effects 
of all the hurt that comes with being. I want us    

to stop wanting. Bear the sky that hugs these eaves. 
Restaurant kitchen dim with oil, iridescent scales in the sink 

from all the lives we gutted so we could live. I am sick of 
food chains, putting knife blades to mouths. In my hands,

the fish splutters with skyline, also wanting. My mother 
tells me I smell foreign, which I translate as in transit.

An airport after all the people have left. I say
I am driving to Los Angeles. Neither of us cry.

It rains when I leave. Lightning
a hairline fissure somewhere behind us, so terribly small. 

My mother nurses a mason jar between her hands,
coaxes lamplight out of its grieving insides.

I used to catch fireflies in here, she finally says.
They always died before I could let them go.

About the writer