MATTHEW ZHAO

Chanson for My Father

I remember our neighborhood roads
paved over with fresh cement,
like golden paths for a child
learning to ride without training wheels,
since black ice and potholes became traps
or vehicles of peer pressure.

Hit the speed bump! You’ll fly higher!

We’re not seated at the back of the bus together.
So when the driver yells Sit Down!
we listen because really, he cares
and doesn’t want soft heads hitting metal ceilings
on collision. That’s why we wear helmets.

My mother implored elbow and knee-pads,
even shin-guards, but my father taught me to
fear pain and constantly work to stay righted.
I remember sterile sewing tweezers forging red
over stove fire. Mom dug for embedded gravel
in my knees, tiny crystals hued Himalayan pink,
cauterizing her own flesh and blood and meat.

I remember wishing Mom’s mom with dark skin
had descended from mountains and monasteries
to mainland China and maybe I inherited powers
like higher hemoglobin for more oxygen. I wanted
to run faster in kindergarten and in college take
bigger bong rips without coughing. I’m always
the youngest or at the bottom of the roster.

Soon, I’ll show them.
I was the back-flip kid until my skull grazed
the pool’s hard edge.

Remember, incomplete rotations come from
lack of commitment. I was the shithead who
bragged about all-nighters and cramming for tests,
The sunrise is a beautiful prize at the end!

For attention I’ll show them my scars and say
I’m doing well, my dad taught me to succeed,
forty-four patents gleaming like Olympic medals
in frames hanging on his office wall. It’s easy to
brag about you, like in my common app essay
on the prompt of heroes. I repeated what I knew
to be true, how you grew up bagging rice and now
sleep in silk pajamas. A real hero merely tries
doing good like efficient parallel parking and
driving at a hundred and ten.

Superman flew fast enough to reverse time but
my dad invented a chemical for rearview mirrors
that tints the reflection of bright headlights at night
so I say we draw comics and recite ballads for
the man who shields our vision and
protects us on the road ahead. 

Matthew Zhao is a poet from Michigan, now a PhD student at Florida State University. He was a finalist in the National Poetry Series and Mississippi Review Prize, and a semifinalist in the Word Works Washington Prize, Longleaf Press Book Prize, Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, and Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. His poems appear or are forthcoming in swamp pink, Four Way Review, Frontier Poetry, Summerset Review, Indianapolis Review, Shade Journal, Ibbetson Street, BoomerLitMag, PRISM International, Diode Poetry Journal, Good River Review, Pinch, and elsewhere.