Year of the Snake

Love Potion

5 Love Potion My mother’s plants are like favored siblings. She cuts back their stalks, nips their buds with quick, ruthless snips. They grow, bloom, and don’t talk back. I become good at sabotage— tearing the heads off snapdragons, pinching open their jaws between thumb and forefinger to stare down their gaping throats— pistil and stamen ivory wisps of uvula, flickering tongue. I stuff each one of their mouths with the juicy, choking weight of a Nanking cherry, and line their heads in colored rows along the back alley fence as a warning. I steal an old margarine tub, the kind with orange crowns, fill it with pink drops of my mother’s hand 6 lotion, a shot of Chanel No. 5, then stir in crushed mint leaves, the tender petals of sweet peas, four spider legs pulled from the Daddy Longlegs caught lurking around the back door, the yellow, pinhead centers of my mother’s African violets, which roll about like plucked-out insect eyes. A squirt of sour rhubarb juice, a creamy dab of Pond’s cold cream, and a spritz of mosquito repellent for good measure. Next I gather Siberian snow peas from the caragana bushes that border the side fence, slit open the slim pods at the seams with a red-stained thumbnail to spill out a palm full of peas, pale green, like tiny lima beans, to string together 7 with dental floss and a needle. I wait three days for the peas to turn hard and round and brown, with tortoise shell whorls like tiger’s-eye beads, and then I drape the necklace as an offering around the bony clavicles, the fierce pear-shaped breasts of the South Seas wooden carving my mother hides behind large pots of Christmas cactus, whose earlobes I like to rub for luck. I let the love potion ripen, grow swollen, rank and full of power, and then I dab it, like ointment, inside the sleeve of my mother’s pillowcase, on the cuffs of her denim jacket, along the brim of her gardening hat, a dotted trail on the face of her hand mirror. I think that her heart is made of glass, that my fingerprints will 8 sour, and flake off like dried milk. But instead, I find her in the garden, cross-pollinating her flowers by hand, in case the bees hadn’t done it right. Her fingertips sticky and yellow, she touches my cheek and asks, Who was the first person who ever thought to eat an artichoke? Inside, I check to see in her bedroom mirror, and her golden buttery thumbprint marks my face, that blooms alien, like some pale and questioning flower. ...