Two Poems by Ruthie Chen

Letter to My Mother's Mother

Dear Ama,

I’ve never seen you cry—but when I do, water fills up a room and steeps for days. A slow-moving crescendo starts and ends as a funeral in my nostrils, all swamp and must and marsh. In August, Houston is a fever that never breaks. Between refrigerated buildings, blasts of humidity blanch the body, slacken the skin. At the curb, crown molding goes tender under tarp. The air above it shimmers and splits. I’ve learned that heat, like water or memory, can seem solid enough to grasp until it turns pavement to puddle to pudding beneath your feet.

Rain ransacks homes in this city, skips the bayous named after buffalo and paved over with a Caterpillar, undresses closets, demands more. And the land here, only clay, can’t handle the Gulf’s belly laughter, though I imagine you can relate. When the ground unclogs its pores in Taipei, what do you find in the gutters? How would you compare the graze of a typhoon to my grandfather’s callouses? And what does that have to do with why you took him back? Every time I see you, you have fewer teeth. Forgive me—I imagine that the animal of your suffering is a white tiger chained in someone’s backyard, bathed in Texas sun. Did you know that Texas has the highest tigers per capita outside of India? How strange, to measure something by what it shouldn’t contain: a room by its spores, the air by its particulates, a nation by its maternal deaths.

What was it like to give birth to silence? I recently learned that white tigers no longer exist in the wild. Their whiteness is recessive, a product of inbreeding binges. The whitest of them shed their stripes in heat, singe the pads of their outstretched paws on concrete, swim in the light as if buoyed, unbothered by the oppressive sameness of a cloudless sky. I was told that after the birth of each of my aunts, your mother came to the hospital to see you. Upon hearing that you’d failed to produce a grandson, she’d turn on her heel and leave without a word. I want you to know that I know captivity can be a kind of survival. In the city that finally broke me, my desire is a door that bursts open, lets the rain make aquariums of the places I used to live. I hear the static that heralds a storm and start to salivate. If you believe, as I do, that a wound is just a compromise between living and dying, does it always take the shape of a daughter? If you were to ask, I’d tell you about the hours I used to spend in the loosening of my childhood, hosing down the same plot of dirt; watching rivers turn dust to deep mud; molding it between my hands; listening for the call to come inside.

Mink

 “They with no past / And fire their only future”  –W.S. Merwin

four million minks in Denmark
wouldn’t stay dead, once-warm pelts

turned like tectonic plates in their sleep
ballooned belly-first toward the speckled sky

and thawed the frost-packed fields,
a cull-turned-coup come to make us whole

they say animals only do what they must:
dart toward water, carry their calves

nuzzle the earth, molt as a matter of fact
drill cavities in the trunks of felled trees

but we are the only ones who lead our own
to slaughter and call it safety—a precaution, perhaps

exhume shadows of ourselves from shallow graves
plowed in haste and call it                   —a negative return

the minks are not metaphors, rather
tall glasses of milk we swallowed as kids
mint leaves shriveling on the mantel

jam-streaked cheeks dimpling at dawn
sandy topsoil sifting looser and looser
and I wonder what there is to learn from

all this,
other than          this is not a metaphor
(the long slow march of ants must mean nothing to you)

and I wonder if all this,
all this
is supposed to make me think of children, too