Khaty Xiong

I have come to collect the various species of America: ruby-spotted, tigers, kites & pipevines — an armory of wings & two-week bodies. The room swells openly & I ascend to the top — I am separate from the boy who swats persistently. Tucked in the corner of a window, a white morpho, the only kind to perch long enough for me to satisfy my collecting — its lunar afterglow still hanging as I pulse & pace to get a closer look. I am separate from the boy who climbs a nearby tower & shouts for his father. Perhaps I am half of this — a set of dots for eyes, spine for spine, my insides half my father’s — half my mother’s.Kuv tus ntsuj plig unlike the fate of quick bodies, sovereign cavities, mother whose torso fell early in harvest — a bed of muscle to hold her from splitting in two — & do we hear it? As in a fever the boy runs back & does not see the white morpho the way I must see it: my personal moon stone-ripe in this foreign corner, mother as fauna forever — inhuman & gazing. Then my body a chariot pulled by a pair of orange helicons sweeping towards the main water feature (complete with koi). This place in which I dream the new body — whole & abiding — I am reaching for the boy now as warden to both the living & the afterliving — the privilege in every gesture — like mother’s first gifts: name & citizenship, poetry always in departure, the song about the moon falling over, fast in flames —