Elegy with my Mother's Lipstick

I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific Ocean.
Torrents of rain shirr the sand. On the other side,
my grandmother sleeps soundlessly in her bed.
Her áo dài of the whitest silk. My mother knew
her mother died long before the telephone rang
like bells announcing the last American helicopter
leaving Sài Gòn. An arrow shot back to its bow,
a long-distance missile, she’d leap into the sky
to fly home if she could. She works overtime
instead. She curls her hair with hot rollers, rouges
her cheeks like Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern,
and I’m her understudy. Hiding in the doorways
between her grief and mine, I apply her foundation
to my face. I conceal the parts of me she conceals,
puckering my lips as though dangerously kissing
a man that loves me the way I want to be loved.
I speak their bewitching names aloud: Twisted Rose,
Fuchsia in Paris, Irreverence. I choose the lipstick
she least approves. My mouth a pomegranate split
open, a grenade with its loose pin. In the kitchen,
I wrap a white sheet around my waist and dance
for hours, checking my reflection in a charred skillet.
I laugh her laugh, the way my grandmother laughed
as she taught me to pray the Chú ??i Bi. I remember
braiding her hair in unbearable heat. My tiny fingers
weaving silver strands into a fishtail, a French twist.
Each knot a child she never got to name, buried
in the soil of her, the barren plot where she keeps
the relentless odor of communist soldiers locking
her only surviving children away. I’m sorry, mother
of my mother, bodhisattva with your thousand hands.
No child in our family stays a child their mother can love.
When I knew the body assigned to me wasn’t my body,
when I heard the murmuring in my heart, I followed it
across oceans wider than the distance now between us.
I found myself on a shoreline, a shell glinting in the tide.
I pressed it to my ear. It was you, still laughing, chewing
a fist of betel root. Your teeth black as the unlit dawn.