“What we remember from childhood we remember forever–permanent ghosts, stamped,
imprinted, eternally seen.” -Cynthia Ozick
–saturn,
i wasn’t old enough to remember why i named you after a planet. nine years passed and your
pages are blackened at the edges like a milky way diagram, a diary born of confessional prayers labeled after the fall of second grade. ah-po tells me to preserve my memories when this glasslike body ages, before love hinges its backbone in cemetery incense, a burial ground of ah-gong’s ashes and my voice box preserved in one plastic diary
–saturn,
the middle school girls ripped a page from your spine and laughed until my eyes grew bloodshot. i told them i loved writing but this ink never felt so foreign in my fingertips–to enter recess meant wringing my saltwater eyes until your pages drank away the tears. i love you for being my only friend. i wrote you an entry titled, “perfection as a free-body diagram” and it consisted of bible verses scrawled on the torso of a blonde girl: antonym of a mirror image. the girls taught me that to have dark hair is to embody the nighttime like ink on an adolescent body, lies i wished i could unlearn.
–saturn,
ah-po was right. nine years have come and we know not what we hope to be, but saturn…i fed
you too many entries, watched elementary angst bleed its confessionals into poetry, ink bleeding
into a young girl’s vision, a decade after ah-po promised me my writing would help me
remember what love felt like. saturn, you saved my moments into entries worth remembering;
call this poem the reason my pen still writes in her memory
preservation splits
through baptized womanhood:
metamorphosis.