Migration Elegy

Grandma tells me she’ll cut
my hair in her yellowed bathroom

her hands two dreamcatchers
laced with bird bones

soft and silent in the wake of spring.
I am near-blinded

by cement and red dye, an oriental love
seeping under her fingernails. She crowns me

queen of leaving, princess
of our motherland, the singular bulb

fluorescent above us, flickering enough
to remind me I was baptized

in the blood of another land. As her fingers
peck, my tongue returns, years

sweeping back through the mail slot
with split ends and a foreign lilt

I once tried to bleach with lessons. Outside
a wet market strings roosters from the neck, readies

the sidewalk for songs of blood and half-kilogram
tubs of eels mothers cleave
along the backbone, carcasses

gushing unloved life.
I breathe in
each time we pass, soak silk in ink

and come closest to living inside a metaphor
for flight, while Grandma braids my bangs
into migrating monarch butterflies. Perched

on the cusp of my ears until her thumb digs
into my scalp, rice paper windows
letting in unwashed light. It will be silent

inside the kitchen when I give up
on writing my way back to her rusted door.

Right now, all I have is two birds
flying, and a third remembers
it’s just a figment of ink and silk as it falls.