By Monica Falcon

America loves its daughters
Cradled in the calloused hands of those incapable,
Words scraped together from the ground to settle, then
decanted in the sentiments of
What it means to be used,
to be loved.
But such a child never wanted anything more
than the milk boiled to the rhythm of a heart reverberating.
Where the trees carrying pollen in spring
smelled of a hometown longing to be remembered,
In the place where my mother and father plotted fields of chrysanthemums
and taught me that watering alone will not make them grow
There needs to be sunlight first to nurse the life,
to nurse the sickness

America loves its little girls wrapped in
Color-blocked bikinis with grass stained knees
suckling honeyed poison,
Until they begin to crave the kind of love
That rots from the inside out
Where in languid movements, and
bare skin blushing under a perpetual summer
I learn to distill memories and drown them in vinegar
Let bruises bloom deep purple hues,
brilliant reds and soft pinks
Until the phrases decorating my thighs become the words become the letters become the
Syllables
Poured into the depths of lullaby
And sung to the tune of a Sunday morning whisper

America loves for its deserters
to beg for forgiveness.
Loves, if anything, to prick the skin beneath the nail,
draw out the marrow,
So lungs filling with water
Nourish the tempest growing inside me
Turn it sweet
Until one morning I can wake to the smell of this baby blue earth
And that hometown longing dissipates in the petals of a thousand chrysanthemums
Salted and pulled from the warmth of my belly

When the world, on the clip of its axis
Stops
Turns to me,
Dares me to leave it

Monica Falcon grew up in Austin, Texas, where she spent her childhood writing endless stories and painting anything and everything she could get her hands on. She graduated from Rhodes College with a BA in Creative Writing, and soon after, moved to South Korea. Currently, she works as a part-time instructor and studies Korean at a local university in Seoul.