Sophia Pan

an abecedarian to my mother

actually, this is a confession; a police report to the red on my hands surrounded

by neon yellow caution tape,

because, mother, i fear i have closed off the makeshift bridge you deigned suitable for

daughter in the land of opportunities; i have failed your

childhood fever dreams of gold plated recognition for a wicked black stage so listen, please:

to the

dirt you had stepped over to achieve your american dream, compressed by euclidean’s

promises, your daughter’s not in the same

extreme of ropes tied down to perpetual railroad tracks forced to run rusted, burnt sienna. her

knots had fallen aside, eroded from the sickening sunlight blinding the

future you planned for her as clear as the sesame oil oozing down her mound of pristine white

rice. she sits in

geometry class for the novelty, a lack of necessity, the shapes she saw filled in with vivid hues

that covered the angles, “find y”, so she asks for

help and you lecture her on nights spent with problems in mind while her brain tangoes with Picasso at

midnight; she also hunches over thin white calc, pages of polars that

itch to be coated in windsor and newton acrylic paint while a clock ticks faintly a full 360 degrees,

reminding her of the

juxtaposition she is, sitting facing a polished wood desk eyeing the timer on the ipad that reads 00:01. she

sees water, a

kaleidoscope of SAT interrogations that she leaves starch white on her scratch paper, glistening with guilt

as little-you appears, an apparition that eyed the stopwatch reading 00:01 with a satiated smile in

last minute corrections done with buckets of confidence. the difference between “you” and “i”, a canyon

children cross wearing the latest grippy socks, shoeless on the other side that parents stand on.

mass murderers we are, i killed your dream of 17 years because i couldn’t learn to tightrope walk, when

the slightest of winds twists the rope coming out of your mouth,

“你能干什么?” what can you even do? her mouth then opens to vomit rebuttal, “it was different back

then” clamps her lips shut with a hot iron poker; it will always be different, mother. you

openly accepted the immigration act of 1965 back then but now stem closes more doors in the flower

buds of her brain, she’d rather they bloom than it open another pathway of “freedom” to the vase.

perfection is only perpendicular when you want it to be, the wings of the plane that carries us to safety

making an x to the body, the variable you realize i am not the

quintessential daughter to your bloodline, her organs culpable with dye i splashed on to hide behind, when

white gets the bouquet—

red-40 is not edible but you buy it anyway. on the way to the store for the ketchup she drowned her

sharpie scribbles in, the silence a finer line than the ink from her pen as the radio turns on: i’m

sorry, the old me can't come to the phone right now, why? you know “y”, right? she’s ruining your

reputation, a pair of garden shears, the root of b^2-4ac turned negative. silence, “i don’t like your

tilted stage”, raked for ballet as the bottles roll to the floor clinking in every rotation over tchaikovsky, a

twisted ankle escapes the audience so vastly dark the pin drops mute. a spotlight you

understand, a performance. when the words of a language fail people resort to movement, hand signals in

a foreign territory most natural, unspoken rules of etiquette don’t comprehend the

vernacular language strangers speak on mobile, sound on. silence, it’s how i learnt your anger, the thicker

the black strip of no man’s land the thinner the line is to jump rope with, distant since childhood

waves out cadmium yellow bus windows at pursed red lips lined in dior rouge shade 999, coos from

mourning doves in fields. the smell of gasoline plumes pulling into doctor offices of monochrome

x-rays, veins criss-crossed like roses on graphing paper beating to avoid the incoming winters, an eraser

pressed against pencil lead

yet to drown, the asymmetrical field of red roses crisp in parallel columns—your child is a

disappointment. i am a

zoo but all the exhibit doors are open, prison gates pivoting gently in the wind.

Words from the Author:

“An abecedarian to my mother” is an abecedarian (shocker!) portraying an experience I feel is quite universal to East Asian children—the pressure to excel in stem and be amazing at all things mathematical because our parents had to be in order to be able to immigrate to the US. In my poem, the narrator does not fit the expectations of their mother quite as nicely as they want, and thus she tries to communicate this disconnect to her parent throughout the poem, comparing it to having “killed” the ideal childhood her mother always wanted her to live as.”