what to do with a woman's tenderness by Olivia Yang (16, North Carolina)*

:: a portrait of my mother
mother dresses in white satin, she presses
her thin lips together and dabs
with pale handkerchief, smiles with rouge-
stained cheeks, and yet reveals nothing--
a portrait of relentless tenderness.

​mother teaches me to walk
with feet pointed inward as a bird
on earth before taking flight.
she walks this earth, too—tender,
imagining roses across the sky, falling.

---

:: study in red and yellow
hibiscus bloom next to mother’s vanity mirror,
gold-flecked lullaby. she sits and stares--
something bloody stares back, it terrifies.
(she lets the sun flood in.)

:: native speaker of elegance
mother teaches me to hold
my body at sloping curves
as a swan does, back arched
and nose pointed upward.
she teaches me to hold a gaze,
as when an eagle locks eyes
with its prey—somewhere,
doves skim a lake.

i unravel with lidless eyes
rolled back, swallowing back
sobs with the burning
of something soft.

mother teaches me to dissolve
my edges, flares of brittle hegemony--
she teaches me to accept
a man pressed against the soft lines, to suffuse
my mourning with the sacrifice
of something being holed.
​
i shudder and harden, the chaste moon makes me a gate.

:: notes on birds
an eagle, claws injected with brutal instinct, a dove,
enshrouded in clouds of innocence.
the eyes of a swan—radiant, empty.

​(think of a swarm, birds clattering in a silvery cage.)

​:: note from my mother
it’s late
and im trying to teach you how to fly, to wrap your fingers around
the moon, unfurling in chaste luminescence. i want to show you
how the shadows promise too much, how to listen
only to your hands. they are your eyes in the night--
that makes anyone an enemy. and i’m trying to remind you
that it’s cold outside, that shudders of glass breath will break. and I’m trying
to show you how even the smoke chafes the skin as you walk past.
i’m trying to teach you to forgive - to know
that this thing called imagination is a dagger, that none of us were ever pure.

:: my fair lady
mother swallows the burning church, tulle and lace dragging
behind. the water swells over the bridges, dry and bloodless.
london, london, london.

:: eulogy with unanswered question
and now that you are eclipsed
in glittering ashes across the sea, please,
reassemble your bones, torn carcass
feeding unanswered prayer,
and teach me once again--
how to minister the wind,
how to to polish thin skin,
how to envy a flame.

:: in my dream
a bird’s bones in flight—no,
crumpled paper set alight--
no, satin burning the color of sky.