Memory, Migration, and Molasses
Three quite personal poems explore the waning bonds of family and friendship, the ache of migration, and the bittersweet taste of memory.
Poems by Nancy Yang | Southern-born poet in California
Molasses
No answer this morning
when I tried calling Mom,
who always used to pick up
on the first ring, or she’d call right back,
a habit formed long before caller ID,
when she’d hurry out the door,
her back upright.
My sister tells me Mom forgets now
where the buttons are on her phone,
that her Facebook was hacked
again. I’ve been thinking
of that December
when Mom introduced me to molasses
after I’d asked what she meant when
she said I was slower than it was in January.
I see now I was her
dreaming, dawdling
child. I recall
the long, deep breath she forced,
as she did often in my memory,
before she led me to the kitchen
to make a batch of ginger snaps.
I watched the slow, thick drip
of the dark substance from the jar
she pried open with the flat,
ribbed rubber gadget, long gone now
like dad’s figure appearing
in the golden light, carrying lumber
to the hearth, the moment over now
like Mom’s autumn.
That night under the blue-gray blanket
my head on her shoulder, I tried my
first bite of the spicy cookie,
and heard my mother’s heartbeat
and the slow cracks
coming from the fire.
Poems by Nancy Yang | Southern-born poet in California
BROWNIE TROOP REUNION
The old paisley kitchen
wallpaper looked like blood spatters
to my friends after school, over milk
and peanut butter crackers, we laughed
at Lori’s impersonation of Ms. Bashuk
at Melissa with a banana to her ear
pretending to call her crush, professing
what preteens only wish they could—
we said it around that table
and over the phone. We girls had each other
on speed dial: long cords wrapped
around our index fingers, hours-long dreaming
out loud. Our bodies were changing
together—mood swings, we shared sweaters
and cassettes—Bon Jovi and R.E.M.—we’d fight
for your right to party. We danced in Lori’s basement,
sought Sara’s advice, braided Kristina’s hair.
Michael liked Tori, and all the boys
were getting mopeds. We’d ride
on the back, for moments grown and free—
warm wind on our bare arms, holding on
to a boy.
My family moved the next year
from that old kitchen to a new state,
our group, we’re scattered now: Minnesota, California,
the rest, hours of Atlanta traffic away
from each other. Most of our fathers are gone,
two of our mothers, a spouse.
And last summer, one of us
left this world on her own terms.
For Sara, we reunited around Lori’s parents’
dining room table, toured the old
basement with its light oak paneling, crawled in
to see where we’d written our names on the walls
of the fort under the stairs, a sweet space
for pretending. Everything is still as it was.
Poems by Nancy Yang | Southern-born poet in California
Sanctuary
Today, my fingers fumbled
when I tried to view
a photo I’d taken of an iris in the snow,
when on my iPhone screen we were
outside the church, our children
small and grinning, holding
their crafts from Sunday school.
Our old lives popped
up fast, so I stared to remember
who I was before my country
went crooked, my religion—
my roots I try to hold—when uncles
scrubbed the walls
of the narthex, grandmothers
made the chewy chocolate chip
brownies when Pa Pa was sick.
My beginning feels messy now
through the window
of the house with a clenched jaw.
On my flight yesterday,
the middle seat next to me, a man
in his sixties, his baseball cap:
I miss the America
I grew up in. So high near heaven
I wanted to ask what that looked like
for him, uncover how the sanctuary
he remembers from his youth
might somehow be like mine,
but looking out
at the day’s cold climate,
I didn’t know how.
Nancy R. Yang is a classroom educator with her MFA in Writing from Pacific University. A long-time transplant to California, she grew up in Georgia and South Carolina, where her love of art was formed. Among others, her poems have appeared inPoetry South, Willows Wept Review, Aura Literary Review, andThe NightWriter Review, where she was a finalist for the Golden Quill Writing Contest.