From Liang Yue Xian: The Letter

From Liang Yue Xian: The Letter

From Liang Yue Xian: The Letter

How it sits in his hands.

“Who’s it from?”
Her son looks away.
“Susan.”
Su-san. A girl’s name.
An Australian girl is writing to her son.
The coffeeshop patrons grow quiet.
Fat sizzles in the restaurant’s woks, upstairs.
Traffic roars round the corner.

Questions,
as if he is suddenly a stranger,
as if he has come from a far-away place,
sat down in strange clothes, demanding a coffee.

Someone strange has come in and sat down in their coffeeshop.
There! Her breath in the words of the letter.
A glimpse of the handwriting—
round, neat letters.
A faint outline of a person is starting to form.

His mother thinks of how words
flow out of a body and carry the ghost
of fingers, a face, a heart.
She thinks of the words that have etched themselves
on the walls of her life: I surrender,
We are at war; the words that weigh heavily
on her tongue as she stands and watches
the face of her son: I love you, Come home.
Come Home.

But she cannot hold him, how quickly he slips from her gaze
to those words on the page
that are taking him away,
to a place she has no name for.