Michelle Chan Brown
Pride
My mother is in a state of not-dying. I say it
flat as if a phrase could capture a pulled-out
place in the inky universe, where she, grape
lipstick and asymmetrical haircut, grandmotherly
in loose-assed jeans, asks if I’ve left water
on again. Thirty-one years passed before I could
see the weeds encroaching widows’ sills, green
up to their throats. Here, sentimentality. Here,
disclaimer. I slip black need into the flagstones’
groat, I bury stubborn under glib, de-plane
to a state where my mother isn’t. I don’t think
about what’s supposed to happen is a better
person, humbled by the worms’ altruism,
stirring cumin into thick stews, new nails with half-
moons of earth to prove their good. Those azaleas,
damn them. I do not cry in bathrooms. I do not
research chia seeds. Gray with six-o-clock, I pick
frosting off the office sheet cake and eat the whole
hard sugar flower. Drink my head out. Therefore small
digging gestures will not accumulate to a life.
My mother scatters self-pity like bright stones
into the garden, shaves curls of it, cold butter
into her so-so peach galette. I get divorced -
his choice. Look on the bright side, she says.
She wears her sunglasses to the Leisure World gym,
pumps iron until the diapered ladies whisper
What a show-off. I do not blame them. I do not
blame him. I lie, I automatic as irrigation systems.
What was needed but rain? Easy. Easy. A house
lousy with ivy trembles with no sex, inept ways
to reclaim my body, so we liquor up until woozy
suffuses with wasps’ nests with color. If you do this,
he said, prepare. Thus I grow sudden interests:
real disaster, thousand-piece puzzles, all sky,
no stars. Damn the azaleas, spring’s re-run,
the sun’s above asserting again. I thought myself
ready for who I angered, what I loved.
Michelle Chan Brown’s Double Agent was the winner of the 2012 Kore First Book Award, judged by Bhanu Kapil. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review, Witness and many other journals and anthologies. A Kundiman
fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Michelle is poetry editor of Drunken Boat and has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and others. In the fall, she'll head to Almaty, Kazakhstan on a Fulbright. Find her online
at www.michellechanbrown.com.
Return to January 2015 Edition
My mother is in a state of not-dying. I say it
flat as if a phrase could capture a pulled-out
place in the inky universe, where she, grape
lipstick and asymmetrical haircut, grandmotherly
in loose-assed jeans, asks if I’ve left water
on again. Thirty-one years passed before I could
see the weeds encroaching widows’ sills, green
up to their throats. Here, sentimentality. Here,
disclaimer. I slip black need into the flagstones’
groat, I bury stubborn under glib, de-plane
to a state where my mother isn’t. I don’t think
about what’s supposed to happen is a better
person, humbled by the worms’ altruism,
stirring cumin into thick stews, new nails with half-
moons of earth to prove their good. Those azaleas,
damn them. I do not cry in bathrooms. I do not
research chia seeds. Gray with six-o-clock, I pick
frosting off the office sheet cake and eat the whole
hard sugar flower. Drink my head out. Therefore small
digging gestures will not accumulate to a life.
My mother scatters self-pity like bright stones
into the garden, shaves curls of it, cold butter
into her so-so peach galette. I get divorced -
his choice. Look on the bright side, she says.
She wears her sunglasses to the Leisure World gym,
pumps iron until the diapered ladies whisper
What a show-off. I do not blame them. I do not
blame him. I lie, I automatic as irrigation systems.
What was needed but rain? Easy. Easy. A house
lousy with ivy trembles with no sex, inept ways
to reclaim my body, so we liquor up until woozy
suffuses with wasps’ nests with color. If you do this,
he said, prepare. Thus I grow sudden interests:
real disaster, thousand-piece puzzles, all sky,
no stars. Damn the azaleas, spring’s re-run,
the sun’s above asserting again. I thought myself
ready for who I angered, what I loved.
Michelle Chan Brown’s Double Agent was the winner of the 2012 Kore First Book Award, judged by Bhanu Kapil. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review, Witness and many other journals and anthologies. A Kundiman
fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Michelle is poetry editor of Drunken Boat and has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and others. In the fall, she'll head to Almaty, Kazakhstan on a Fulbright. Find her online
at www.michellechanbrown.com.
Return to January 2015 Edition