L’ANGE DE NEIGES
by CHI PHAM
My mother bathed other people’s mothers for eleven dollars
an hour. No money for babysitter yet so I tagged along, small
rajah of the Medicaid hallways, watched her insert the plastic
going-in, watched her wipe the shit that comes from
bodies that can no longer govern their own expulsions.
The smell was death but institutional death, which is
death plus product, death with a scent profile, death
compounded. I was four. Jenny was five times my age
then, my age now, an orphan and half of her brain
was missing which is a medical fact like telling you
the wall is white. Angelic as patients tend to take the form
of in the nature we imagine for the hospitalized.
Her skin pale yellow in the residential light, gown
slipping from her shoulder like the origami swan
unraveling its song. Our third year in the country.
I had known her for a day. She had known half of me
for half of two in a manor of speaking, though in the hospital
she did not know me, her jet eyes gone milky, whites like
skimmed winter pressing its tongue to the window.
My mother’s hands in the bowl of her ear, tending
a form of light that does not warm.
Half her brain already gone—but where?
(I wasn’t sold on heaven yet.) No one visited.
Too old at twenty for the photograph with volunteers.
Too halved, too Vietnamese in America, where my mother
bent to bathe a girl who could have played her daughter.
Neither of us citizen yet, and who needs it anyway? Not now,
anyhow. Jenny, my second model of beauty
whom I made angelic through my looking—
I wanted her to see me. The next day
the blood reached her brain and reunited the half
on earth with the half in heaven or the half
already dwelling in the light or the dark or the optic disc
between where God withholds sight like a control
measure, a gift we cannot recognize until it’s lost.
My mother, in the kitchen, among the day’s facts:
Jenny hemorrhaged. Among other facts.
She didn’t cry. She had other bodies to tend,
other non-daughters to bathe one last time
and I was escorted out, half saved from what I wanted most:
to see the blood reach the white country, the body busking
its atrophied wings, the moment the angel is made—
But my mother had already moved to another room.
Hands in another bowl of water.
Another light that does not warm.
Chi Pham is a writer living in Houston, Texas, born in Đồng Nai, Vietnam. His poetry, criticism, and reporting appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2025, the Texas Observer, and Texas Highways. A runner-up for the 2025 SmokeLong Quarterly Award for Flash Fiction, he is a junior at Rice University. More of his work is at seaheye.com.
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