BEGIN SCENE
Me in silhouette hunched over my desk. I am doing homework at the desk in my room so that I can be successful in this new place just like the mother wants. The mother’s figure hangs poetically dark in the doorway holding a plate of mango, or pomegranate seeds, or dates, or orange slices, or apple slices, or pear slices, which as you know take the place of an apology for some cutting devastating thing she said in her language and then again in a language I would understand—my language—earlier. This cutting, devastating thing is love at its core and means I need to be successful in this place which is new to her but not to me, causing tension, because she came here for me to do just that and I am not sure I can.

I cannot tell her about my unsureness because we have separate tongues—we have since the day I was born onto the outside of her body, since I climbed out of the ocean dripping wet and monstrous, an enormous stranger —so we can never talk about it. She is afraid I will die. I am afraid she will die. This does not make anything hurt less.

The way the mother cuts the fruit is like a poem. The way the mother cuts the fruit and hovers in the doorway with the plate of cut fruit is like a poem in a language I do not understand. The way the mother cuts the fruit and hovers in the doorway is like a poem she would have written if she did not have to come across the ocean to here, or maybe more accurately somewhere in the middle. The way the mother cuts the fruit and offers it, hovering, in the doorway, might be like the kind of poem she would write if there was not an ocean in between us.

I do not know that eventually I will hold this poem carefully like a fragile dumpling full of the perfect amount of pork and chive filling and revise them into a new, harsh language. I do not know that I will eventually conceive of this as a kind of lying.
END SCENE

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