Ma, hear me now, tell me your story again and again. — from "From a Heart of Rice Straw" by Nellie Wong For we think back through our mothers if we are women. — Virginia Woolf Her skin is smooth & dark. She is olive. She is child-like now, her mind happily traipsing somewhere through her twenties or before. She thinks of me as some friend, an acquaintance, she ever the houseguest in her genteel home that she mistakes for my own. She often asks for her husband, picturing, I think, that younger, handsomer version who hadn't yet wrinkled, balded, or failed. When my dad, whom she calls "old Dave" appears, shock creeps into the corners of her mouth — an almost smile, she is ever-gracious. I bathe her, dress her, direct her to the food I've prepared by cutting it as I do for my young child. Everything is mapped out neatly, clearly on the plate. We go over & over which is spoon, fork or food. She laughs that light laugh of my childhood, says she hopes she's not being any trouble. Thin elegant fingers, now shaky, find the seven dates I've splayed along the plate, a gift from my home in the Middle East. Since in her mind there's no relation, she's thrilled at all this time together. We really need to see each other more, she says, but I worry it's a bother. I love it when we visit, I tell her, & my daughter loves to see you too. She compliments me on my parenting, on my daughter & our relationship. She & I bemoan absence of fathers, husbands, a woman's life. She tells me a happy child is borne of a happy home, that I have built the home in which my daughter finds freedom. I tell her about my mother: handwritten notes in school lunches, her daily acts of love. Her light, a candle that burned when none other was there. That permanence, that presence. How she served me with compassion, bathing, dressing me, hiding my secrets, smoothing my scars, absorbing my pain. I say, I learned everything from her. My mother, both earnest & faraway, says, "how lucky for you. I tried to be a good mother too. It's difficult some days." How did your children turn out? I ask. Like yours, she says. Happy & free. We do what we can, right? I say, laughing, & wink conspiratorially, we two mothers, ancestral women, creators, storytellers; strong.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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