the other girls call me 留守儿
    left behind
because 妈妈 packed her bags with blouses and promises
        caught the train to 杭州
and shed a single lotus petal tear
            as she said goodbye in a cloud of grime and grit.
i unfurled my love-lost hands, imbibed her crumpled sorrow:
                 加油，我的爱
but the greedy hands unspooling my ratty pigtails
                     knocking my knees against the humid silt
and...

There are sixteen statues reposed on my chest.
So call me a museum, call me

Medusa. Call me dead girl calcifying
her own skeleton into oblivion. My heart

a sailing stone, these veins
its ossified impressions. The showerhead 

weeps scalding tears that sculpt 
my slantwise cheeks. See how marble busts

transfigure their skin into blades, all the better
to carve themselves reborn. Plastic surgery

learned its perfectionism from us.
Dead girls preserved 

by society’s white-hot stares. Effigies
of acid rain...

You cradle my girlhood to your chest.
        (Yes, I’m fragile. Do you mind my brittleness?)
I don’t write about you very often, I apologize
        
        in correspondence cached beneath your bedroom door.
        It’s painless to untangle my femininity from my mother, 

but your fingernails are a magnet for my resistance.
    I wrench my youth from your red-chapped hands.

Teeth spill forth.

        The ones you collected on your pen as you gave me the tooth fairy.
                (Did I ever say...