LAURA MA
The Yellow River Will Take You Home
i was born on a good day, my lunar birth date ghosting
on the reader’s fingertips. he flips through the pages to
search a birthright, an astrology that
i never knew. the reader says that i was born on a
good day, that i was always meant to be a lord.
always meant to rule. yet these fingers have
never sifted through the yellow soil of this realm,
a field that these blistered palms should know.
for i was born on the first day of spring, the awakening
of the dragon from slumber, the next ouroboros. the
shedding of the previous metamorphosis, every new rain-blessed
scale worth a geography of a hundred middle kingdoms.
born on a good day to be a lord; to be a
god—what am i but (a blessing for a faraway land)
a betrayal of my own? for living is to hear
the whispers of those before you and know that
you do not fit into their legacy. it is to apologize to
the snake mother that you are made of the wrong soil,
that you are not like her other children. it is
to be stitched with an anagram of creation myths,
patched with the living, aching to breathe in your own skin
and learning to strip it whole. apart from the
old bones of a million enshrouded by mist, this
bleak countryside – graves dug & souls sheltered—let me
reclaim my snake blood as an apology for being
a dragon in a foreign land. reclaim my birthright
as an apology for letting my
soil sift in soft, white hands.
Laura Ma is a young writer from California. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the Pollux Journal, The Aurora Journal, Claw & Blossom and elsewhere. At midnight you can find her exploring aesthetics and wishing that it would rain. She loves light, wings, and all things that fly. Find her on Twitter @goldenhr3.