Mother Poem

My mother, grower of tomatoes, and whisperer to earth
harbors her roots deep under faraway soil.
I study her like a gardening manual, poring through the details of
daylight, acidity, infestation.
She collects delicate tea pots and flowery saucers,
tiptoes on the borderline of
hoarding shiny purses and brightly printed dresses,
a master of fast fashion, in fact
she has always been a lover of fast things:
Her temper running in and out like a hail storm,
her sunflower laugh, the split second she calls me to say
she’s seen a rainbow, and her decision to leave
and chase a happiness running faster
than she could reach.
Mother, sometimes I catch you in my mirror
though I don’t know whether to water or pull the image from its roots.
But this I do know: we have
always felt hand first in a dark hallway
filled with roses and thorns, jasmine and spider mites,
orchids and aphids, love and drought,
these living things hold hands and spin all around the floor,
bumping into ankles and slipper-encased feet,
our human roots grasping and wrangling the earth for stability.
It is in this cacophony that we learned to coax
at the blossoms, re-pot the soil, tend to the fertilizer,
study the angle of the changing sun,
point out to each other where it is rising
and where it will go.

Other-Worldly

If I could have dinner with any person, real or fictional,
I’d choose your soft pillowy lips, because there’s nothing
in this whole wide universe I’d rather be doing than
kissing you. I’d fly us to a little beach town
on Saturn where we could finally afford
to be mansion owners, and garden growers, with
jasmine candles all in a row
and did you hear?
There are unlimited matcha lattes (for me) here
they grow next to the Saturn peaches, in the Saturn orchard down the ring,
did I mention there are unlimited fuzzy socks (for you)
in every color you could ever wonder about? My love, can’t we go?
You see, you miss one hundred percent of the time we spend together
when we’re apart. And I can’t stand to see you so blue,
not on Saturn, which the scientists say is yellow-brown or as I like to say,
golden bronzed like vanilla box mix bloomed
into shortcake. Say, are we an item
-ized grocery list scribbled at Trader Joe’s on a Sunday morning?
Because I love you when you write me a bounty
of sweet nothings: salmon…broccoli… ice cream…
You always say we are a match made
in a Korean barbecue restaurant, I say
in the stratosphere, we can hold hands
and stare into each others’ brains for (Earth) days on end
and when we get homesick we can still vacation in
Chicago or San Diego or Beijing… there’s a new
high-speed floo network here, and I know traveling will be as easy as
you are on my eyes, especially on those rare occasions
when you are in dancing mood,
because that’s when I see you are the most
free. My love, you will enjoy this planet so much – because Saturn is a gas giant
with an average radius of nine and a half times the amount
that we like to laugh… it is named after the Roman goddess of love
at first kiss on the hand, which means we would be happy here,
so very happy here.

Molly Zhu is a new poet and she lives in Brooklyn, New York. For her day job,
she is a corporate attorney and in her free time, she loves thinking about
words and reading and eating. She has previously been published in Hobart
Pulp, Ghost City Press, and The Bombay Review, among others. In 2021, she
was nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her first chapbook is being published
by Cordella Press this year.

You can learn more by visiting her website: MollyZhu.com