From Those Gutters, My Mother By Haro Lee

By The Rising Phoenix Review on July 31, 2024

From Those Gutters, My Mother

Grows a Botticelli belly: a protrusion of heart
beat where the hunger should be. She imagines
love contained in the house. How she speaks to her fetus
is confection. Sugared songs dissolve on her tongue,
night and night again. She takes her vitamins,
relishes this mistake she has made with the baby's father,
so certain that God is making it up to her.

She does not know this. When that child grows,
she will have to convince her to live. The child
will learn there's not a reason for everything,
mothers are not bloody saints. This perfect
conception was arranged without sin, but with trauma.
How could two people come together, knowing
how much they had lost, and created more to lose?
The child will be born with a broken brain. Every
mistake she makes will hurt too much to move
from. She has too many animals within her.

Mother. When I swallowed those pills,
you wept over why I did it. I only imagined
this would be the way we could leave together.
I held your hand and told you: a child should never
have to watch her parent die before her.

By Haro Lee

Biography:

Haro Lee lives in South Korea with her grandmother. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Zone 3 Press, The Offing, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. She was also the recipient of Epiphany Magazine's Breakout 8 Writers Prize. You can find her @pilnyeosdaughter.