mama wants wildflowers from the orchard for the kitchen counter, for company when she kneads dumpling skin. i am certain: my favorite animal that i’ve never seen is love, the sort of beast that feeds on koko loko bushes because their flowers blush too weak. I embroider roses on my jean-blue dress, an empire waistline, when the dough i roll is too thick to be a petal, and is snipped like a stem grown sideways in buckingham.

when she fills the things she crafted with scallion-scattered pork, i know this is the only fondness we’ll ever touch. i wash the skirt she bought me and the pleats erode, like dumplings tumbling over a periwinkle flame, folds loosening as the

heat tightens and the bubbles pop. i should have been garden bud, bloomed politely, cried tears of. perfumed dew, something worth a monet in the morning.

one november she made fruit tarts, apple slices curving as corolla, so we could sit on american crusts. i thought roses were only worshiped in spellcast glass domes, so i imagined myself a beauty and her, the beast. if i could, i would steam my skin smoother in a bamboo basket, serve myself on porcelain china polished the. white i never was. maybe then I could compete with the flowered vase, bleed a red that daunts the love phoenix pale. maybe then we could leave the orchard and make rose dumplings on the counter, no longer empty with its marble echoes of the words we never said.