ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Dorothy Chan is the author of Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018) and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Academy of American Poets,The Cincinnati Review, The Common, Diode Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. Chan is the Editor of The Southeast Review.
Triple Sonnet for My Mother’s Full-On Soap Opera Fantasy
I grew up watching soap operas
with my mother: the full-on fantasy
of white women in low-cut tops
competing over who could go the lowest
before a nip slip in jewel tones
in the middle of daytime TV,
because these are your problems
when you’re a retired movie star cougar
relocated to the tall pine suburbs
of modeling agencies and magazines
that rival Vogue, and more power to you
for dating the young con man who pursued
your daughter five episodes ago,
but hey, you were going through a divorce,
and that’s now worlds away in your times
of evil twins and suburban scandals
and ex-husbands rising from the dead
and brain transplants for your long-lost sister,
and onto husband number eleven,
making me reminisce on simpler times
when Liz Taylor married the construction worker,
and oh, you’re just so glamorous
in your slip dresses and your furs
and your houses straight out of HGTV
catalogs and home renovation shows.
I grew up watching soap operas
with my mother, who grew up in Hong Kong,
wanting a dream house in America
my father ended up designing,
complete with the proper feng shui,
because when you’re Chinese, your house is on a hill,
the other properties bowing down:
protection against lighting attacking
your trees, protection against thieves —
What’s a bigger declaration of love
than building your beloved her dream house,
because she gave birth to your daughter
at the age of twenty-five, leaving her family
in Kowloon to join you in America.
I grew up watching my mom fill notebooks
of character dialogue, to learn English —
her fantasies of American life.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
