Poetry: preparing an elegy by Jenny Shen
Jenny Shen’s power in “preparing an elegy” rises as invitation to familial intimacy—the poem rolls forward like a stream of consciousness and captures a mother and her daughter in a fragile moment, in the kitchen, in a conversation with so many, many things unsaid.
preparing an elegy
i ask my mother whether it’s time
yet to start planning the funeral
she tells me she buried us decades ago
lays lillies on the tombstone every few years
but is no longer in mourning instead
she slices papayas open, bathes
her hands in shiny black seeds
waits for her skin to prune, dried
wrapped in rice paper crinkled
crow’s feet splayed out to deliver
messages tied up with red
& white twine across any ocean
that will have her and by have
her i mean shoulder enough salt
to hoist her to cognates bobbing
on a clothesline, i ask her which ones
she’s plucked, and she swats the whole
thing down, unpins starchy fabric
donates it to someone who has never
had to cauterize accented tissue gaping
in the way it invites pathogens
even while it’s trying to heal
i joke that she has empty nest syndrome
she says there were never twigs nor
lichen to lay shelter at heights she’s only
dreamed for, burial grounds only need
shovel, a stubborn foot to plunge
it into earth, maybe a thrumming
memory to upturn the soil, keep it
warm for parcels of dried tea leaves,
soft jasmine rice singed at the words
embers of letters stink of california ash.
put your white dress away, she scolds
your joss papers, stacks of ghost money
take whatever ring you want, she goes back
to dicing discs of garlic and the conversation
is over
Jenny Shen
Jenny Shen is a middle school science teacher in New York City and has been writing poetry since she was a middle schooler herself. She is originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
