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Ashley Mo
A Scientist's Sonnet
Foreign breath is caught mid-air, gutted at the belly, cataloged
the hundredth. Sweet-mouthed, this child—
a jukebox of fissures, built upon a mother’s wilting smile.
Scientists called them logs how they stacked, cordwood
in snow. Water pools from Chinese bodies,
pushing salt down the tongue. You are the string bean strung
into the pore between belt and belly, speckled lung.
Relinquishment lives in the hollow of a doctor’s coat: bleached, blood-
stiff, seams heavy-hearted. Spine swayed, misshapen
into the comma ending a forced declaration.
Please: listen as the womb splits, shaping
Suffering into the shoulders of angels.
My father’s daughter thumbs her belly.
She wonders how it could possibly hold another. Seep
We do when we die
and if not us, then those watching
the heart pitter and plateau.
My father, when overripe watermelon
spat
all its seeds onto our kitchen table or
On the plane next to me a baby,
for mother & sleep & death
& father, too.
Tongues press to jaws by instinct. The first lesson
of flesh, taught by mothers in the womb:
sound tears from us before we know
its meaning.
Sadness turns my body blue, settling in my stomach
spilling loose, clinging to lashes,
streaking my cheeks, afraid
It will be the last thing left.
A tear spans a lifetime—
a sigh shadows us into death.
Why do I so carefully spill
the water hidden
in my bones? My grandmother warned
tears are finite— cry too much, and we dry forever. Ashley Mo is a senior at the Harker School in California. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the Shore, Roanoke Review, Blue Marble Review, Eunoia Review, DePaul’s Blue Book and elsewhere. A finalist for the Santa Clara County Youth Poet Laureate, she has also received recognition from the Alliance for Young Artists, Princeton University, Columbia Granger, Hollins University, the city of Saratoga, among others. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, and the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.
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