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2023 Academy of American Poets Prize

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My mother once said

by Frances Chen

I My mother once said her womb was the biggest graveyard. When my brother asked her what she meant, she placed a piece of red-braised pork belly on his bowl of rice, letting flesh speak for her silence. That night, after tucking my brother in, I found my way to her usual spot on the patio: a rocking chair that shifts against the ocean of the night, yarn spread over her lap like umbilical cords. I looked for her eyes & begged the same question, but no sound exited my mouth —only song. She returned my gaze without uttering a word. Pulling up her skirt, her hand reaching for mine & leading me to the ash -dark scar in the forest between her thighs. “This is your brother.” When I asked for the proof of my being, she made me press my cheek against her inverted belly button. “Listen.” II When you were born, I was in the hospital for three suns and moons. Life left my body like fuming floods, crooked crescents and hollowed ballads. I dreamt that I was a whale beached during low tide. I sang until I knew no one was coming for me. Then one night, I was rescued by the moon: waves swam up to my side and wrapped themselves around the ruins of my body, sprung me from the earth and casted me home. But when I woke up, there was no ocean. Only fluxes of pestering relatives swarming the waiting room with murmurs about how I gave birth to a not-son. I wanted to kiss the baby in my arms, but you flailed and twisted like fish gutted from the rivers, crying and pissing everywhere as if to conjure the warmth where you once belonged. III Years later, she finally gave herself to make a son. Her belly now a sunken island, her hairs the parched stems of once sweet chamomile. Her eyes: windows to a moonless forest. IV I kneel to cup your silence before it dips into the moon’s shadow between us a darkness gasps for air so thick I burn my lips on a girl’s neck damp with our sweats dancing for rains that shot holes into the sky & be

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