Brief Cartography

Mother—is that what I call the woman who held me for three days before the world took me away?

I am learning to perforate my own face. Each nail hole a day I didn't have with you, each tear in hanji paper

another way to breathe around the absence that shaped my lungs.

In the microscope of memory, your fingerprint becomes a country I visited once, briefly, like a tourist in my own skin.

Salt-soap rivers carve through marbled ink—this is how we make ourselves visible: by erasing what we never had.

I imagine you walking me to school, but instead I wrap paper around my own head, golden like the makeup

that makes me almost white, almost someone else's daughter. The gravel catches light the way your voice might have

if I had learned to listen in a language you gave me before they gave me English words for abandonment.

I draw my face looking at someone else's reflection— yours, perhaps, in a mirror I never learned to hold.

An orphan with your name but lighter dreams, whiter skin that never touched yours long enough to know

the true shape underneath. Brown as earth, stubborn as the stones that remember three days of your heartbeat

against mine. Tell me, what is the word for loving someone you barely knew but who lives in every breath?

What is the word for home when you are the distance between a mother's arms and the empty space

they left behind?