Prena Poetry

mother loves the color yellow; the warmness and flames reflecting on her lenses. her yellow silk scarf over her shoulders is ragged now—smeared with cinders as she works up to continue burning the fire in the kitchen. she never gets tired of it even as she offers everything in the house to keep the fire burning. it’s the same fire that the previous fathers in my family chopped woods for but the mothers burnered themselves for, just to keep the flames alive so that someone on the other end could feel warm. now, i am sweating—half hyperventilating in the heat while my mother keeps adding what not items into the fire, making it menacingly bigger. it’s going to burn down the house one day but how much longer will it take before she eventually jumps into it just so her daughter could feel warm. unaware that it’s her own daughter carrying water in cusp of her leaking palms, sweating and screaming, and yearning to finally cease the flame for once and all. yearning, desperately yearning to end it all here and now.

— breaking the generational cycle