Allison's Archives

The sweet scent of sacrifice / is overpowering when I think of her / coupled with an ever-emanating shade of orange / sounding always of poetry / Fitting / as the Chinese character for ‘poetry’ lives in her name / Yet / she is the very poem I have never been able to pen / Still / I will try 

She is good at too many things / She sings / she sang to me when I was a babe / never has another voice soothed me the way hers does / She has a penchant for poetry / or maybe I should say ‘had’ / I wish I kept newspaper clippings of her published work / evidence that she once existed without me / she precedes me / she made me / She plays the piano / used to anyway / I fear the black and white of the keys have seeped into her life / I wonder which colors / if any / she sees the brightest now / I wonder if she sees them in the mirror / I do / She is good at so many things / I wish she were better at being selfish 

She knows too much / Where things are when I cannot find them / Patience larger than god and sea / The precise temperature at which to stir fry dinner / Tolerance for every facet of this unfair life / Hidden stalls with the freshest meats / Creativity that was eventually mine to inherit / The lost art of haggling / How to carry all the groceries in one trip / How to carry all her grief on her own

Ma / What dreams did you have / when you were my age / Which meadow did you want to run in / with your skirt hiked up / with the mud splattering against the back of your calves / with the trees applauding you / with the wind howling your name / Would you have published an entire collection of writing / Would you have sung in jazz bars / Would you have written your own songs

And oh / the worst part is that she loves her children / beyond conditions and comprehension / beyond sin and virtue / ‘Worst’ / because she will neither be rewarded nor punished for such display of affection / ‘Worst’ / because she has never once put herself first since that Monday night in October / What life would you have lived if you didn’t have us / I want to know you without being related to you / we would have been best friends 

Ma / You taught me my first word / I don’t remember what it was / but I hope I called for you / You taught me my first words / and so many more after that / I write thinking that your hand is around mine / guiding / tracing / the letters one by one / within three neat lines / I write remembering you hunched over my study desk / explaining grammar to me / in three different languages / There is no me without you / What would you have been without me 

I am the best parts of her / but I will not be her / She does not want me to be her / I want to save her / Meet her in the meadow and sing alongside her / braid verses into each other’s hair / bury our griefs in the mud / become more poetry than human

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_{The accompanying image (A Mother Plaiting Her Daughters Hair by Anna Ancher, 1915) serves only as a visual complement to the essay and carries no interpretive or illustrative claim beyond that.}