My mother never heard me talk about the bitter winters. 
Every long-distance phone call was mired with the same 
bad questions; bad answers. Static, always in the air, 
the reception; colouring between borders. 
 
In Chinese, 觸 zuk1 stands for both touch and pummel. 
How we brace for the violence in any contact. How are you? 
There is a new absence in my voice that wounds her. 
This forgetting of how home rolls off my tongue, now 
an alien disruption with teeth getting in the way. 
 
I'm ok. With the things I don't talk about anymore, 
often the same ones I still have tears for. To tell you 
that all grief has faces. To say our shadows touched
in the backlight. To know that is the closest we could ever be. 
How my silhouette reaches and reaches towards being real.