SARAH YANG
After Life
& the spinning baby mobile slows down,
its stuffed elephants unaware that they are
elephants. My mother opens the window to let
September inside, lifts me out of the new arms
of the crib and into her own. She swaddles me
closer to her chest knowing that her name,
scrawled on the sole of my newborn foot in black
marker by the nurse, is already fading. She turns
on the news and watches a man dangle his head
out of one of the burning tower’s windows.
My mother presses her thumb onto the mole beside
my lips—as if to snuff out the fire. She kisses
my forehead, still flushed from my bath,
to remind herself that my warmth is so far
away from the man’s. She shuts the television off
and studies the way her teacup on the bedside table
settles into the indentation of its saucer.
Glances down at me nestled into her.
Sarah Yang is a Japanese-Korean-American poet from New Jersey. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets and appears in The Indianapolis Review, wildness, Rust+ Moth, Barren Magazine, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. She studies at Columbia University. You can find her work at https://sarahyang.carrd.co/.