"Immigrant Gold," Winner of the First Filitsa Sofianou-Mullen Creative Writing Competition

Everything you touched seems to have turned to gold except me, mother.

Must be something wrong with the alchemy of my skin

that it doesn’t remember being held and loved like I hear you loved others.

I wish I could honor you better in death, as if I did get to know you

and you never left me, drowning in teenage angst,

to go care for the shit stained porcelain bowls of a better life for us.

I wonder if it became easier for you to say I love you in a foreign language

because I struggle to put your voice to those words

and back comes the blank tape static of a feeling never recorded

and you hurt like the site of a tooth extraction I’ve been told I’ll heal from,

but the lost nerve still throbs when my heart beats too fast.

Like I must have hurt you in the site of my birth and distance between us.

All this treasure you dug up on foreign land reminds me

that I should wail and rage and wash my face with sorrow,

yet here I sit, unfinished, like a broken verse,

because you never got to teach me how to feel

should I lose you.

The only fairness I can muster is that my death should balance the scale of yours

and maybe after that I can live for a little while

free of the memory of your golden touch on other people’s hearts.