Kristin Chang’s fierce and devastating couplets in “Poem to cure my mother’s insomnia” capture the unflinching determination of the parentified child who desires to uproot her mother’s suffering. Packed with wild synesthesia and unexpected metaphors — “dice the night fine / as gunpowder,” “take tomorrow on / your tongue like a pill” — Chang’s poem sucks us into its hurricane of images and refuses to let us go until we’ve wept with both mother and speaker, who has gifted us with this “lullaby I’ll slit both / our throats to sing.”
— Eugenia Leigh, Poetry Editor
Poem to cure my mother's insomnia
If I sugar your sleep & spoonfeed you
light by the eyeful. If I sew the moon
some eyelids & dice the night fine
as gunpowder. If I bomb your dreams
horizontal, will you wake a war
bride? You take tomorrow on
your tongue like a pill. You wake
without eyes, without a mouth
for mourning. I read the spittle patterns
on your pillow: some are maps & others
seas. Here are some facts to put you
to sleep: the boiling point of the sea
is the temperature your blood turns it.
Your father once crossed the Taiwan
Strait in the mouth of a whale. But no,
you read that in a bible bought
at an airport, woke with god greasing
your face like a frying pan, the sun a boiling
egg. Belief is a meal we can’t afford
to eat. Since your father started
dying, your womb closed itself
like a wound. As if orphaning
is orcharding, your body ripens & drops
limbs like branches. I want to stitch open
my sleep & slip you inside, call this surgery.
I want to sew you into my belly & say
let there be night. I want to rebirth you, my blood
your first blanket. You sleep & I’ll steep
my bones for your tea. Close your eyes & I’ll beat
up the sun like your childhood bully.
As a child, you tugged on my legs
every night, as if that could grow me
a god. Mother, if you sleep now, I’ll cut off
your head & replace it with mine. I’ll wear
all your nightmares like nightgowns
& grow into your grief. Mother, here
is a lullaby I’ll slit both
our throats to sing.
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