There is a Garden Inside My Mitochondria
Saggy sacs of small mechanicals.
Primal automatons outdone by hormonal imbalance.
Bodies that wallow in pesticide and desiccation,
bioaccumulates making
small pollutants in the cytoplasm.
These are the ways I stereotype my cells.
When I think about what lies inside those small spaces I can not see, how unfair it is to assume
dark voids, barren spheres of monochrome dusted in greyscale static. What if they contain just
enough to make their own brightness? Small blooms in tiny bursts of violet and lime. Perhaps
there is a garden inside my mitochondria that sparks with marigolds and roses and colors that
exist but have never been seen.
A harvest of gathered light.
A landscape edged
in primordial memory
and chemical seas.
The Cartographers
say my nose is a landmark. A low bridge that is crossed in order to arrive at their first
conclusions. From there, they sketch in my origins, guess the vowels that will untwist
from my self-bound lips,
predict the names of my indoor plants.
They will not see the white in my hair is a tired moon threaded through night, or the salt-tinged
oasis that wells across the parched dunes of my face in the dark.
To speak up is a bend in the knee, an acquiescence to their crooked parallels and unwanted
latitudes, so I do not give them words, feed them only silence, and they make small notes in the
margins
re: poor articulation.
In a quiet corner, they assign a broken
compass that must always point overseas.
I am landscape locked in observation. A map drawn of conclusions and labels, but what is
unable to be captured is the movement of their lips
along my paper edges
and this weary shadow that grows
whenever I am mouthed.
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Jenny Wong is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. Her favorite places to wander are Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centers, and Parisian cemeteries. She resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains. Find her on Twitter @jenwithwords or her website.