A Child of Her Fashioning
She kept splinters tucked in the hollow between her eyes – when I was with her, her fingers held tightly to the rubbed-off plastic of her wheelchair, and refused my offerings; when her nurse came over she stretched out an eroded hand to touch, or dictate,“ keep me as I am”.
Her stare was tilted to the right, her hands were swollen with fluid, I clasped a bracelet on her, tightly woven, but when I took it back it slipped, she shook her head – it tugged past her hands and feathered red on the tips of my fingers.
She was younger than the others and commandeered the mountains, but her hands scrambled past the wrinkles that molded her face,“ it doesn’ t flatter me”- and here, she mauled me, because I looked and became in her creation a child of her daughter, the slant of her fashioning.
And while she mourns the folding of her skin, I kneel at her feet my face cupped in her hands. Water pools in the mountains.
Jane Kim
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