First Snow
BY ESTHER LIN
My mother bought us matching
maroon coats for the event. New
to such clothes, I zipped right into
the wool of my scarf. Last child out.
The hedge held me like a box.
It would burst brilliant pink one day—
my first flowers in the northern hemisphere.
Today it stood puffy with something
limp and indolent, the way it lay
across the stems. With a bare finger
I poked and poked while beyond
my sister and brother shrieked,
trying to build the snowman they knew
was expected of them. It was mostly mud.
Even though snow fell everywhere.
The pavement, the cars. My mother’s
hair. The beautiful country.
That’s what the Chinese call America.
We must have appeared odd.
Three children in identical coats, looking
around in disbelief.
To Build a Church
BY ESTHER LIN
The Abbot Suger’s most delicious
gambit was to slip off his ring
and place it on the altar, then watch
his guests, embarrassed, unpin
their own brooches as he described
how their sacrifice would shimmer
in the quarrying of limestone
and weaving of tapestries, how they
were building the ark that would
bear them up from polluted waters.
Devotion demands some suffering,
after all, a notion dear to my mother,
especially on the night she rendered
her wedding ring to a church. The next
day she asked that I surrender too—
my diary—to God. So I placed my brass
key and book in our recycling bin
and the tenth year of my life vanished.
Suger never lost so much—before
the next round of lords arrived, he
retrieved his ring to sacrifice once more.
As for my mother, she died the way
she wished: not yet seventy and still
radiant in the eyes of men and God.
