ma crossing the sea sightless,
bare body braiding mannequin to family
heirloom. she soft boils her tears
into the red of her qipao
suctioning her breath, her
grandmother’s jade boning her wrists
into cold moonlight. when she unbuttoned
the red of a country against a god
in revolution i dream her hands
calloused into boats, her dreams
marooning her arms into prayer dance
the way fire simpers before it fans
away flame, light echoing shadow.
twenty years in america and she
drags her english against the
confessions; on my eighth birthday
she pushes me into the altar
of god’s house, wishes me salvation
dripping holiness from priests
who taste the unripe syllables
of countries recessive to sin, who
blind themselves to fault yet
gouge their body on the willingness
to fatten during the fast. they teach
me how to calligraphy god’s
epochs, teach me fire from flint
from god from heaven from a body
in thirst so long as its worshippers
prayed to it. i finish sloppy fire
characters and see a woman waving
her arms in plea, a funeral dance;
the next week ma walks me
to children’s bible study; outside church
all the unasked answers
stammering in her broken english:
here is a country that wants
you; here is a church that loves you; here
is a people who see you the way they
could never see me. i am still learning
the language of longing,
elegizing god as loss.

Serrina Zou is a high school student at Basis Independent Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, and a 2019 California Arts Scholar in Creative Writing. Her poetry and prose have been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Just Poetry!!!, the Asian Pacific Fund, and the Bay Area Book Festival. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the National Poetry Quarterly, In Parentheses, The Rising Phoenix Review, Bitter Melon Magazine, Manuscription Magazine, The Battering Ram Literary Journal, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere. When she is not writing poetry, she is either catnapping or avidly devouring novels.