Palinode

Abstract

Palinode Michael Prior (bio) My mother is stalking cabbage moths with a tennis racket. She looksmost like herself when she tenses then swings over rows of kale and romaineat the white specks floating through blue shadows. She is bisectedby the swaying frame, distanced by the poor resolution of the videomy sister just sent. Her left hand is bandaged: tendonitis from pickingcaterpillars and eggs off the leaves with chopsticks. As if to proveobsession is its own lineage I have spent hours checking the sunstuntedshiso for iridescent beetles, bodies tufted with fine hairslike the down on a dandelion seed, spent years wondering what it meantto be her or her parents, uprooted, dispossessed. I can see so clearlytime's possession in the way I speak— like her—the preference for detail,for impossible control, how my skin has pocked and wrinkled, the gray [End Page 295] growing up my temples. I am thinking of the time she was enrolled in an ESL class,even though she only spoke English; the time she told me on the phonethat because I had left, I couldn't come back; the time I stole twenty dollarsfrom the jar under her bed; or all the times she corrected my pronunciation: repeat:indistinguishable, inconsolable, inevitable that I won't return home for another year.By then, she will have stopped dyeing her hair. There are no equivalencies,only echoes. I am alone and watching my mother watching something aboveher head. My mother is swinging and missing. My mother is cryingfor her mother. My mother is referring to herself as Oriental. As old.The cabbage moths arrived on the coast in the late 19th century, just before our family.Now, these shimmering beetles are weighing down the leaves.When I look back, my mother has become indistinguishablefrom the shadows under the trees. [End Page 296] Michael Prior Michael Prior's poems have appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins. He is the author of Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House 2020) and Model Disciple (Véhicule Press 2016). Copyright © 2021 The University of the South