At Thiry
Kyoko Uchida
At Thirty
At thirty my mother was seven months pregnant,
thin as milk and luminous in blues and ivories,
colors for grown, quiet women. She asks
what I am mourning in my terrible black clothes
at my age. Her daughter has grown into no one
she knows, and she is the one in mourning now,
for the daughter I am not, for the mother
I am not.
This year, turning thirty myself, the simplest math
surprises: my mother reaching twice that age.
At sixty we Japanese celebrate coming full circle,
returning our frail, shrinking bodies
to the ritual crimson clothes of a newborn.
For her birthday, someone else's daughter
would send a maroon sweater or a coral scarf,
but what I want to buy us both is
a red, red dress.
Kyoko Uchida's work appears in The Georgia Review, Black Warrior Review, Grand Street, Manoa, New Letters, Northwest Review, Phoebe, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
