Won, Too

Eryn Mei Peritz, U.S.

Tiger mothers do not always come in that inadvertent brand of
immigrant ambition striped yellow.
Sometimes, just sometimes,
if you close your eyes,
one, two, you will be for the taking.
It will take you places
on the border of states supposedly united, so when the airplane will land—
not when your own two feet reach the shore’s sand—
one, two, welcome, new child of this land
take on gratitude, no longer attitude, for the
new pass-port (blue), new hair-cut (bowl),
thankful for no more rooms shaped like lice-infestations ruts (bacterial),
and a new tongue that makes sounds from the gut.

You try to remember the cadence of home in the old land, back then
your calf’s teeth and flat lips couldn’t form
luminary lisps of language,
let alone one language speaking of home; the only home
you’ll ever know is the construct the new home tells you about - that
an Austrian man’s analysis will pluck one
emotion away at a time - one, two,
they’re counting on you (who)? to be a
worthy commodity: bought, sold, and sailed overseas
sometimes the weight, upon slags of your salted meat
makes primordial wounds
a womb like a tomb, you shouldn’t have come out from
and sometimes you want to take back the bones from
the old land cause’ you want to feel old feelings
this is how you connect with the chi, your inner child
and instead of being adopted, adopt this new one-ness of policy
to give your child a chance at a better life,
like lucky bell jingles on white-tiger
sneakers, maybe the bad spirits,
maybe the voice of the bad tiger mother

Is you.

Maybe in one, two,
anew, you can create a new language,
one for adoptees, our own old-world language told
in the only wordless ways our infantile mouths could mold, so
child now adult - together, one, two,
I let the tiger-idol go,
One, two, one-ness is two and two-ness is one
Two-won, I let the layout of the new land roll down the spine
reach the ankle, the unbounded foot of mine firmly planted on the ground,
I make the motions with my mouth to cry a new space,
a new homeland (not for the colonizing tricks of taking), but
the space between late night dashes and triptych paintings I
bought from the profit of some pain
so maybe in a way like you—an incalculable commodity,
the land blinks, one-two like a new escape—this scape free from the dissonance of belonging.
Here you are welcome to stay and you don’t
need a new pass to proceed from one port to another—
here the inner tiger is chained and I’m not a
chalice to be taken, lifted by someone-else’s fingertips,
Here, I am one, I baptize myself, too:
the smallness of my palms and the slight stutter lisp carried on the tongue,
and the small, but stout and no longer salt-wounded one-word vowel of

Home.

Eryn Mei Peritz (丰春苹), 17, lives just a stone’s throw away from NYC on Long Island. She is co-editor-in-chief of her school’s literary magazine, Context, and was selected to attend the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat in the summer of 2020. She has a fierce passion for novelty earrings and pom-pom tailed poodles (hers included), and can be found curled up with a cup of green tea and a good book.