by Mia Ayumi Malhotra

for A.

How the days passed, suffused in summer
light, your curiosity caught by every clover-
filled crack in the sidewalk, every brick

alcove in the parking lot, where I said
now be a duckling! and you fell in line
behind me, quacking, every moment,

a bright Bonita peach, bitten and dripping
down the chin, because soon our family
would be four, not three—for you, age two,

an uncertain concept, four fingers lifted
to mean possibility beyond measure, which
is how I felt, too, soaked in the sweetness

of our play, make-believe in the backyard.
Unlike two, which we’d mastered, or three,
a flight you felt coming, claimed each time

you reached farther, higher, whenever
we swung you, one—two—three! into the air,
sandals flying in the face of the unknown.

I can’t know, you used to say, which was
far truer than you knew, each number
counted to its end, our life just begun.

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Mia Ayumi Malhotra is the author of Isako Isako, a California Book Award finalist and winner of the Alice James Award, the Nautilus Gold Award, a National Indie Excellence Award, and a Maine Literary Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Yale Review, Indiana Review, and The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. She teaches poetry and tends a hillside in the San Francisco Bay Area.