Fold

I never thought reuniting would be like this: suitcase, like grief, splitting open,

airport a mouth swallowing us into fluorescence, a country where I hold my breath

underwater, where I scrub the accent from my tongue like dirt from under the closet.

Two steel bottles cold in my palms, like mirrors that reflect the wrong face. At

Starbucks, my mother unscrews the tin she brought from China, and asks for hot water to

steep the tea I begged to drink

as a child, before I knew latte, before I traded the smell of home for assimilation.

普洱 leaves spills its stubborn scent into air thick with espresso & erasure. when

mother yells out waiter, heat crawls up my neck, apologies multiply like a virus of

shame in my mouth, overcorrecting every vowel into glass. I pleach us in fog, sand

down the rough music of her consonants, fold myself smaller and smaller to fit inside

this country, At the counter, I translate my mother’s wonder, asking for hot water

— once, twice, three times — more water, more hot water to steep the leaves from a

foreign land. Here I carry myself like a stale can

of soda, laugh at jokes that don't taste like mine, and run, and run in the mountains

until my lungs burn. the 普洱 tin sits open, my mother in her chair,

unashamed, waiting for what she needs, while I shrink, want to be smaller,

and fold myself into origami cranes,

into the kind of daughter she wants me to be — unembarrassed,

one who fits in, one who won’t disappear into the wallpaper. I want to fold her back

into the suitcase, to teach her the language of silence, the grammar for less

the way I broke it, the way I am made broken,

crushed into something small enough to swallow. Call it survival. Call it

love — the time she wanted to order ham but asked the waiter instead for a "fire

leg", the time she grabbed my school teacher by her arm, and demanded, in broken

English, to know where the classroom was, the burning in my chest spreading like hot tea

spilled across the tablecloth. From the blue glass of the barista's eyes, I see myself refracted,

foreign, too much & not enough, who scrubs the tea leaves from her own mouth,

wondering why she still tastes bitter.