The Poem My Mother Asked Me to Write About Her
WRITTEN BY CELINE CHOI
My mother is angry with me and how she understands not a single poem of mine but what would scare her even more is the revelation that every last one of them is her fighting its way out of me into me through the mouth and the heart padlocked indefinitely.
My hope is that wisps of cold breath in winter can be me the way it leaves the throat into the world with ease but there is no sane way to repeat this to mother that it is either this seamless becoming something greater than I or coping with the human neurocircuitry of spines composed with highway dashes and cars running over.
If it is a possibility to love someone to life why is Plath not immortal because Sylvia, your paper roses flower every bath I have ever baptized in as I suspect is true for infinite girls slash boys slash humans across America. This country knows the chaos rendered by each God as much as a mother’s intuition knows the unhappiness of daughter but Sylvia, we have no idea what to do with all of this love overflowing from the bathtub.
Did you know I cry every time I write a poem it was never poetry I fell in love with but an autobiography the way I like it literal, about things that happened to me and each time a poem is like rediscovering how to breathe.