Sophie Yu

MotherPixel

If I squint hard enough, I can see
my mother’s face in my stained teacup,

swirling as I blow wrinkles
into the laminated surface.

Now, when I say I love you, it escapes
as a scream. Why do you scowl when I smile?

Why are we both yelling? Every curl of tongue is dressed
in weeds and doubt. Everything slips further away

from the light. My mother’s image is the spectrum
of artificiality, vibrating pixels of light contouring

her scleras black. Through electric pulses, I hear her
voice, a metal disc that packs decibels into buttons.

These are waves that distort each syllable-hum
into incomprehension. I don’t underst–

–and Mama? Static. Static. Gasoline

and dusk-fog fill my lungs as I am crossing
the striped intersection tugging

my spine toward the earth, my Achilles snaps
underground to kiss hell and the silence

between each crackling letter: I l    oo ve yo     uuu—

We are both deprived by this distance between
moss-brick dormitories and puckered jujubes

my words rush by the thousands, stumble
in choppy, incoherent hiccups, fuzzy and crumbling

at the edges, paragraph after paragraph after paragraph
exhaled out of mother-lungs and into a single

nod of the head. lift of the chin, understanding—
ilo  ove y    ou utoo.

I cradle light in every molecule of my body, translate it
photon by photon into my arteries, oxygenated

in my blood, stitched into the microfibrils of your cells. A lullaby
flutters alive, landing like a crimson paper crane

among my palm full of twinkling windchimes, moaning
floorboards, chilled mandarins cracking, splitting—Mama?

Static. Static. Perhaps
the precise weight of our love will swallow us whole.

Sophie Yu (she/her) is a student poet at Phillips Exeter Academy and a New Hampshire Teen Poet Laureate. She is a published author of two poetry collections, as well as the co-founder of Nova Literary Magazine. She is also an alumna of the Sewanee Young Writers Conference and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers Program. Her work has been featured in Spotlong and Eunoia Reviews, and recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, both regionally and nationally. This past summer, she served as an intern for the Academy of American Poets. If you can’t find her in a warmly lit cafe, she is most likely scrapbooking in her room with jazz blasting and a hot cup of jasmine tea brewing on her nightstand.

Literary Magazine: https://www.novalit.org/