From the attic above the pond

Because my mom didn't get her green card or her driver's license until I was in middle school, and because my nuclear family unit was far too religious to tolerate how much the rest of my family enjoyed skipping church, I spent large, unbroken chunks of my childhood at home with my mother, whom I quickly identified as vastly different from every other person I knew. From a very young age, I was encouraged to correct her broken English, a struggle unique to her alone which did not seem to massively improve. My dad and his parents discussed the way that she would talk to her sisters on the phone like there was a punchline fundamentally obscured from my view. I dreamt of her speaking with perfect grammar only once, and it bothered me for many years that I couldn’t explain why I felt too afraid to obey or reply. As a little girl, witnessing my mother navigate through her life taught me that there is power and privilege in being able to fine-tune language so that it snags on the intangible sensation of empathy. My honors thesis and poetry chapbook <i>From the Attic Above the Pond</i> dwells among themes of gender, language, love, and identity in poems such as "Modesty" "True Mother," and "On Being the Daughter of an Immigrant." These themes affected the relationship I had with my mother, a Filipino mail-order bride, as a mixed person growing up in the southern Bible Belt. Furthermore, my poems discuss information and its accessibility, such as in "Wikipedia" and "It's Like That Documentary, in the North Korean Computer Room" — a theme that ties to identity and language because of how closely fluency in English monitors how much of the world is truly intellectually available to them. Within these specialized vocabulary clusters, my verses dance upon the themes of science, abstraction, divinity and history, which inspire poems like "Seeing Cueva de las Manos," "Conception," and "The Universe-Rug Store." <i>From the Attic Above the Pond</i> is dedicated to the vibrant and colossal beast that is the invisible labor of women, and to the tether I have always seen around my mother's foot. When she is searching for a word and I find it for her, she peels back my world like a curtain, and each time my poetry is already there.