‘Questions for My Mother’
— Joyce Chong
vertebras still healing like fractured roof shingles
you can’t climb to fix. In this town, the swallows follow you
everywhere.
In ‘Questions for My Mother,’ notions of femininity, family, and the past are explored. The passage of time, the inevitable collection of more; more knowledge, more scars, more experiences. Where identity and physicality, or the body, align, and where they split off in separate directions. To whom are we willing to disclose pieces of ourselves, stand at the crossroads of two identities, as mother and woman, and find something as rare as plain honesty?
What I found beautiful about this poem was the sense of closeness in the observational nature of the language. What the individual discloses about themselves, and how the narrator, the external, can reveal so much more of the whole picture. Like creating an image of a person using only reflections, only indirect photographs. How it can sometimes feel so much more real.