A Kind of Ritual

After Albert Abonado

I know the language of my mother’s grief:
unfurled sheets, a door swinging wide,

onions left bleeding in the sink.
Each, a kind of signal fire

swollen sick with emotion.
Each, a sorrow she reduces

to gesture. Has no words for,
shrinks small as if to say

this tongue is not mine
Immigration taught her this:

your identity is a second skin —
it is usually convenient

to kill yourself. Shedding,
is as easy as speaking English.

Nightly, the pillows grow heavy with ghosts.
So many selves have yielded here

wrung thin like tripwires.
The body count rising as she struggles

with pronunciation —
cannot bear this language

that sounds like thrashing, that rinses her gums
into clean indents, into the imperfect tense —

which is to say that this has happened
before and this will happen again.

By 岳天明