Generational worship: ode to the annunciation — Mikayla Hu
1.
I am your God.
You split yourself wide open and force me to look at the protruding bone so I can decide that you’re worthy because your tender flesh is rotting and the stench of devotion fills the air. You choose to cut yourself over and over and over again, asking if I’m grateful. I wonder, if you’re so willing to bleed for me, then see me.
Don’t make me beg on my knees in the same kitchen your husband hit you, choking on my tears and your blood, pleading for you to understand that you are not an offering and I am not your God.
Begging for you to see me as not divine, but just your daughter, so that when you bleed again tomorrow, I hope I have the heart to tell you that I needed you as my mother, and not my sacrifice.
2.
You smell like the white wine I know you drank the first time you hit your wife, the wine she hates.
You tell me you’ve never been seen, never been loved, but I do. I love you and I will shield you from your own rage, knowing that if I reach for remorse in the wrinkles that line your face instead, I will find none. Knowing still that no matter how much I love you,
You will always love yourself more.
So as I grow older, and the wounds of your touch on my mother fade, tell me,
Do I look like your wife?
When I wear her clothes, and my face settles the way hers does, and I also say that I don’t love you anymore, will you hit me too?
I wish that you would, that you’d strike me and prove me right, so I won’t keep waiting for it my entire life. And I wish I could’ve been your father so I could save the girl that would be your daughter, the woman I am now. So I could teach you that not being known doesn’t have to be the reason to not know, and that when the wine finally kills you, I wouldn’t have to say that I’ll remember you more fondly than I knew you.
3.
My baby, my child.
I hope you never look for me. When I give birth to you in that cold, stark hospital room with no one but a blonde nurse telling me to “push,” I hope you’ll never find the young woman that cried and screamed and bled for hours with no one to hold her hand when you were born.
That when I sat in that bed stained with shit and blood and finally held your screaming lump of a body, I noticed that you had my father’s nose and my mother’s lips, even if you’ll never know them as your grandparents. It was only when you cried in my arms for the first time, a child clutching a child, did I realize I could only teach you what they taught me. That I could only love you the way my mother did and your father had only loved me the way her husband did. I let you go, hoping that some day I’ll give life to another child that has more than his nose and her lips, but my laugh as well and will grow old enough to drink white wine with me in the kitchen.
Mikayla Hu is a junior from the DMV that is currently training to become an EMT. She loves to write in her free time, whether that be journaling, editing essays, or writing prose poetry. Her most recent read was Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.