My mother is stalking cabbage moths
with a tennis racket. She looks
most like herself when she tenses
then swings over rows of kale and romaine
at the white specks floating through
blue shadows. She is bisected
by the swaying frame, distanced
by the poor resolution of the video
my sister just sent. Her left hand
is bandaged: tendonitis from picking
caterpillars and eggs off the leaves
with chopsticks. As if to prove
obsession is its own lineage
I have spent hours checking the sun-
stunted shiso for iridescent beetles,
bodies tufted with fine hairs
like the down on a dandelion seed,
spent years wondering what it meant
to be her or her parents, uprooted,
dispossessed. I can see so clearly
time’s possession in the way I speak—
like her—the preference for detail,
for impossible control, how my skin
has pocked and wrinkled, the gray
growing up my temples.
Palinode
Michael Prior
Michael Prior's poems have appeared in the New Republic, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, the Academy of American Poet's Poem-a-Day series, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop's The Margins. He is the author of Burning Province (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House 2020) and Model Disciple (Véhicule Press 2016).