Origin Story: Triptych by Jenny Qi

In other words the past is a kind of infancy.

Origin Story: Triptych

by Jenny Qi

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1. Infant


I don’t remember the first time I lost my mother.

I can only imagine:            infant wheeled 
        through airports         infant crying 
in grandmother’s lap          infant diaper change 
        in economy class bathroom.


Birthed from Latin       infant 
means not speaking      unable to speak.

In other words             I cannot ask her
what it was like:           each separation            a loss.

In other words             the past is a kind          of infancy. 

After returning            I’d sit in mother’s lap
staring at photos of myself 
who could not speak:   infant in blue
                     stroller               infant in yellow 
                     sweater              infant in blood-red 
                     coat.

Now grown  I scan photos of my mother 
from when she was younger than me.

Is death a kind of infancy? 
The dead cannot speak either.  

In dreams we babble        a nonsense language 
infants together        cradled by stars. 


2. Kid


In the first dream        I’m a little kid 
           on my first        yellow school bus. 
A man with a greasy ponytail snatches 
           my mother from the sidewalk            pushes her 
into a dirty blue car. He looks like a shadow 
           of Disney’s Gaston.    I watch them disappear
from the bus window            wake from naptime 
           gasp-sobbing             so I can't speak.          
My animal panic             scares my bullies 
into patting my shoulders with kid gloves. 

Kid was once a crude word for children 
sold into labor in British colonies—children 
bought and worked like livestock—little goats 
born to be seized and consumed.          Kid 
           nabbed.             Kidnapped. 

Now I am old enough that my friends have children. 
The babies scream when their mothers turn 
away for a moment—primal fear of loss.

In the second dream             I follow my mother 
           up the long spiral of a crumbling stone castle. 
In one version          she stands outside 
           helpless as a tower collapses around me. 
In the other             I am frozen watching her
           buried beneath gray stones.       

3. Stone


Like stones I skipped a grade             and then another. 
           When a skipped stone slows            it quickly sinks. 
Does the stone feel             itself slowing? 
           Does it know           when it sinks? 
Did my mother skip me      because she knew 
           how soon she would die? 

When I stopped            I thought I might die too
           stoned and moss-sunken.     

The sea by San Francisco is filled with worn 
           headstones of the forgotten. 

Stone comes from an old Germanic word 
           meaning to stiffen. 

My father accuses me of being stiff
which is to say he does not like me with boundaries. 

After he remarried he kept my mother’s red 
urn in the attic for years. 
I thought of stealing ashes to wear around my neck 
in a precious stone like a neighbor 
who made her Siamese cats into a string 
of diamonds one after another. 

One day I was away he buried her 
in my garden beneath a mound 
of small white stones. He only told me 
after the large cactus yellowed and died. 
I avoided thinking about it for months.
Is it okay to replace the dead with living?