Beloved

Came to America in 1987 from the Philippines with my mother and younger brother. We had eight hundred dollars and a phone number for a cousin in Massachusetts. Thirty-eight years later, I am a registered nurse, my brother is a software engineer, and my mother — eighty-three years old, still sharp — lives in a house she bought with cash in 2002. This country let us begin again. This hex is for her, and for every immigrant mother who carried her children across an ocean.