Spitting Image by Liz Femi after Chen Chen On the back shelf, wedged between two cans of condensed milk, the shocked nerves of a dandelion. Dryad lion. Fountain of anxious light spooling from its head. And because it takes all kinds of lions to corner Daniel in the den, some lion, too, has no choice but to be the kind of lion his lioness mama raised him to be. Most days, I dream of living as full blown exoskeleton. But that’s not enough time to condense bone into anything but what my mama raised me to be. I’m ready to admit that a spitting image is an image that spits out its own kind. Flummoxed organs reject blood type, macrophages scream law & disorder the flags & they say at the end of the day isn’t family a kind of country? I am not a nice idea. I’m an aloof anthem. I’m an anxiously attached sermon. Resplendent flowering from my father’s immigrant head. Unordered, discountryed parts to assemble into twelvefolds of a fortune teller or is that a crumpled love letter? I am not the anti-antigen my mama raised me to be. I’m a thrill-seeking dandelion. In eighth grade, I pulled myself through the eye of a joke so I was a kind of exoskeleton but only for a short while since needles are tiny, obviously, & so I spit myself back out into the joke, crawling on all fours through the jungle. In first grade, I learned clouds condensed into rain. I thought tears were condensed thoughts & the sky was trapped inside my mama’s head & my mama was trapped inside the sky’s head & they kept each other company. I asked how she was. She cried as long as a book: the world was a bandage of dandelions & my mama raised me to be a species of silence
