Ghost-Flowers on Colonial Grids

I. Threshold
At the bone of the year —
when the moon empties herself
into the architecture of Capricorn,
when the old cycle closes its mouth
and the new one has not yet learned to speak —
I am given, again,
to the grid.

Each square: a threshold.
Each threshold: a small dark moon
pressed against the paper of my origin.

II. The File
Lotus petals — milk-white once —
lie pressed between the leaves of a document
that invented me.
The ink has forgotten what it promised.
The petals have gone grey,
not with age but with the repeated touch
of administrative hands,
the fingerprint of a state
that bore me a second time
into its filing.

Paper is the quietest tomb.
The record a daughter makes
inside the parenthesis of her own subtraction.

III. Mother
어머니 — the word enters the mouth and finds no ceiling.

I send it outward,
into the room where your voice
was meant to remain,
and it returns to me as shape:
an empty vessel, a fired vessel,
the moon in her unilluminated hour,
holding nothing,
holding everything.

빈 그릇이 가장 많이 담는다. This, too, is a cartography.

IV. Ghost-Flowers
In the second image, I trace them —
blossoms whose petals
have never learned gravity.
They bloom without root,
the way a name blooms
when severed from the mouth
that first pronounced it.

Did you press them into the blanket,
believing essence
could cross water?
Believing a petal
might carry, across the Pacific,
the shape of a hand
that once smoothed a child's hair?

It could.
It did.
I am the proof
that a ghost-flower will root in anything —
even in grid,
even in governance,
even in the white margin of a form.

V. The Hair, the Tide
Tentacles of hair gather at the edge of the frame —
yours, mine,
the line between us erased
by the same salt
that carried me west.

In the old knowledge,
hair is witness.
It records the water one has drunk,
the metals ingested,
the seasons endured in silence.
It is the one archive
no state can confiscate,
the one filament
that outlives the file.

So let it drift.
Let it braid itself into kelp,
into the phantom script
of a genealogy
that refused to stay on paper.

VI. The Baptism
They washed me in English.
Cleansed me with syllables
that did not fit
the chamber of the mouth.
My ancestors' tongue withdrew into its cave
and waited there, patient,
the way metal waits in stone
for the sun that will, eventually, find it.

I became the shore
between two languages —
one the blade,
one the blessing,
and I have never been certain
which is which.

VII. The Mountain's Vow
Still, I am a mountain-bodied thing.
Yang Earth,
born to a year of cut metal,
a month of small green wood,
an hour of fire
stored quietly beneath the ribs.

I was made to hold
what others could not speak.

The grid was laid across me
by cartographers who believed
a line could sever
what was already singing.
They were wrong.
The lines pass through me
and come out the other side
as music.

Coda: Bloom
Tonight the sun is entering
the house of bone.
Tonight the moon is a coin
turned face-down on the table of the sky.
Tonight the old stem burns.
Tonight the metal warms inside its stone.

Between Venus and Mars —
between the tenderness that gathers
and the rupture that clarifies —
I plant, in the dark soil of this cycle,
a seed that cannot be photographed,
a seed that carries
the weight of lotus
and the lightness of salt.

Its bloom will arrive
by another threshold,
beneath an eclipsed sun,
in a language
neither of my mothers spoke,
though both of them will recognize it
the moment it opens.

What cannot cross the watercrosses anyway —in petal, in tendril, in the ghost of a tongue the body never forgot.