A Bed of Land

A Bed of Land

My aunt spreads
her legs, flat over
the hospital bed
with the rice plate
compressed on her lap,
feeding herself,
chopsticks in one hand
and grains of rice trailing
a path, dripping from her
pale mushroom lips,
streams of tears, wet
flowing from the Pacific shores
near Ocean Beach,
beneath the waves miles from
Hong Kong Harbor.
She starts again,
hovering her mouth on the plate,
scooping the rice abruptly in,
swallowing, a navigating alligator
at close edge to survival,
in her memory of Chinatown
immigrant children
the bedrock of her roots.
She lets the empty plate
slip from her lap and
crash beneath her.

By Paula Mak-

SFSU 'Transfer 72" Copyright Fall 1996 by Associated Students in
association with Creative Writing Department