Film with Sea Salt
We are approaching shore now.
The fisherman at the dock skins
a sea bass, pretends it is his lover.
Still, my hands stain with forest
& the sails do not answer to my call.
I want it to be eight years ago,
my mother feeling for my eyes
from the hospital bed. Richmond,
where I learned the Mandarin
for granite, or the color the camera
pans to in a film where the protagonist
only likes sweet things & all the children
turn to stone. But I am still waiting
for my mother to call my name.
I am still waiting for the sails to lower.
I know all the lyrics to the Chinese
lullaby where a swallow escapes winter
with the wind twisted in its throat
& all the water wrung from its wings.
My mother cannot name the color
of salt, nor the shade my eyes turn
underwater. I do not remember
the right way to gut a fish, or the ending
of a film with a hospital bed & birds
weighed with rocks. I am still asking
for my mother back, but the fisherman
bends to drink from a puddle of rainwater
& does not answer.
Lily Zhou is a high school senior from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2017, Sixth Finch, Waxwing, The Adroit Journal, and NightBlock. She has been nominated twice for Best of the Net.