in my mama’s jeans with my daddy’s attitude

Ava Min | Spring 2024

when I was fourteen, we entered a panera and I told you I’d found lifelong happiness. 

so clever, so quick. or maybe twelve, but I felt fourteen, in 

our family. 

over cheesefries and other boat-yellow moments like when I whispered alzheimer's for the first time but grandma wasn't quite there yet, don't say that, don't fucking say that, but then the diagnosis came and james is my daddy's american name but that day he was just joonhong and a pale shade of third-sibling mustard. and I was convinced for a year that I made it happen with a hotline to hell because god hates gays and that's who I was, 

until oliver. oliver who left as soon as we made purple, oliver too pretty and not all there, oliver in the night re-soldering the walls around us, oliver a sapphic renouncement, oliver four-corners and fine lines and a long island stutter that made you croak with laughter because what kind of a chinese boy wears his shoes in the kitchen, 

because a daughter is just a mother with new hands. pressing in a man, his edges. & driving brown into pink. & a daughter in her mother's jeans is the period to the paragraph, because secondhand vintage ends a natal cycle the way economy ends a motherhood fantasy. because kumon more than my groceries and i'm already eating cup noodles and instant rice and I used to be scared of raising my daughter like her grandmother but now i'm scared of raising her at all. 

tell me this, 

do you regret anything? 

in dusty windows and stickies on the island, I am an iteration of the multiverses you forewent as a domestic. to know who I am is to know every fig hanging from plath's mother-tree that plummeted to hell. which is where we are.