The swallow drools and drools
for love, creates a nest of its love,
which is stolen and boiled into soup.
We call this a delicacy, a crystallized shell
of pilfered love. My mother and I loved to slurp
its easy, syrupy strands, hungry for sweet
spoonfuls of convenient love. And I try
not to picture the flock of swiftlets
left destitute, their mouths shrieking like a yellow tube,
crying for their mother to make a home
out of nothing again, to drip her spit over and over
in the darkness. I was a creature of habit too,
an animal with my own needs for comfort,
my own limited mother. No,
what I mean is, no mother can stop her love
from being carried off, no matter
how high of a ledge she places this love,
no matter what it takes from her body
to secrete each precious thread—something
with its long hook will trespass and jolt
the nest from the round corner of the cave. And the mother,
the mother will weep another pure white bowl.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 1.
Lijia Xie (she/her) is a poet, an immigrant, and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford. She was born in Beijing and grew up in the San Francisco Tenderloin neighborhood. She earned a BA and a MS from UC Berkeley and an MD from UC San Francisco. Her first collection of poems, Public Airing, received the UC Berkeley Eisner Prize. She is an MFA student at Warren Wilson College. She has received fellowships from Writing By Writers and SF Writers Grotto Rooted & Written BIPOC Writers Conference. She lives in Oakland, CA with her family.
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