YOU

KENJI C. LIU

It was discovered that the best way to combat Sadness was to make your sadness a door. — Terrance Hayes

i am my mother’s eyes and ears now, opening to all newness as if signs the bright green sprouts of calendula, submerged but faith leaping, following directions from dreams day by day, it will happen, keep looking writing, trusting you and rain clouds making way for december’s half light in the apartment, our dead returning through all its small doors when i cradle you, my mother will hold me again, a red thread runs between us into the future the bush offers one pink rose at a time i meet her in every feeling now writing, hoping these words wrap around you, warm and feathered this is where my months have wept, in this corner of los angels, so many doors i leave the crumbling gardens via passage from the other downpour to this one