Ode to my mother peeling clementines
to the way she lines them up
like suns from another world
each demanding its own set of misshapen deities
to her thumbnail scalping each fruit
down to its tang
to every purse of plasma
the sour scald beneath our eyelids
when the juice erupts
to the pith we pull away like blistered skin
to the skins that curl inwards like spent omens
how they hold the scent
of our prayersmoke, our tofu-steam
long after we have stopped kneeling
to the way my mother bites the end of each segment
keeps only the bitterest for herself
to the benefits she recites
as she passes me the best parts —
to brighten your skin
to flush away your heat
to strip the white from your tongue
to help you swallow
to the pads of fat at the sides of her palms
that grow sticky as fresh hearts
to this sugared stitch that holds
two halves of the day together
Natalie Linh Bolderston is a Vietnamese-Chinese-British poet. In 2020, she received an Eric Gregory Award and co-won the Rebecca Swift Women Poets' Prize. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. Her pamphlet, The Protection of Ghosts, is published with V. Press. Having grown up listening to multiple languages spoken by her family — and discussing meanings and archiving fragments of conversations — her work often concerns linguistic inheritances, distances and losses.