When I was younger, I wrote about love as though I owned it. April is an unlucky month, I think now, where the sky in the afternoons is the smoking grey and TS Eliot is once again right in his musings. There’s the singing of the kettle, Grandma, and you are in the garden; there’s cruelty in the way you weed, yanking the poor grasses out by their throats, bodies ripped from homeland. Roots and tendrils gasping in the stale air. There’s the dirt on your thrifted trousers like mud countries and your birthmarks shaped like border disputes. How many miles you walked as a child, Grandma. Body moth-eaten under the blood-red Chinese flag. I was lonely, you told me, and it was a bad time to live.

Grandma. Your gardens of chives, parsley, rosemary. Your hands smothered out by the years, sloughing out of worn tissue paper skin, scapulas bone sharp. Yesterday in your hands, hands alive under today’s liberal sun, and the rancid scent of tomorrow’s gardens rotting. April is an unlucky month, I think, the earth slouching with our weight, the dead bird of mine buried at the base of the persimmon tree out back, long before I could give it a good life. Poor thing spent its life behind bars because it had nowhere else to go. Let it out in the wild, and it would have been free and dead in three days time. The bird had no name, or at least, I have forgotten if it did. Now, it is memorialized in bone. Grandma, I see you through the slant of window. I wipe off the remnants of dinner from the kitchen table, wash plates, and stack them in the creaking dishwasher. My eyes burn with darkening afternoons and whatnot. 

A friend once wrote that summer is a wine scab torn off too early—I see it now, days in their rapid approach slick like vegetable oil. Outside, the sky has run out of temper, the cascade of rain pelting down like sudden gunfire on the hip of the roof, what little sunlight there is now is left souring, the broken vertebrae of skyline jutting out in the clouds. I’ve been living however I can, in ways I cannot have imagined. I don’t say as I think, and I don’t think as I should¹; I look at the past of the garden, and my mind wanders to guns and dissolved timelines. Perhaps we are always hurtling our bodies toward the things that will destroy us: culture, communism, samplings of homes in this sweet earth. Makeshift tissue box graves for birds, dirt ingrained beneath the soft of nail beds. Everything unravels at the punctum of all things, and this garden is more than both you and I have bargained for. 

Are there still beautiful things? The bird reduced to its bone says no. Grandma, will there be a day you will wake and forget the outline of my face? You make that joke often, but I am afraid it will become more than just that—an uneasy laugh at dinnertime. Grandma, I am like you in your youth, but I feel a cleft easing between our bodies, our symmetries congealing into two. I am only now beginning to understand; you should have taught me the wounds of your body sooner. Grandma, hold my hand—I am running outside to you. All I have ever wanted was for you to be proud.²

¹ This is a quote taken from Franz Kafka, he writes, “I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness” in a letter addressed to his sister in the year 1914.

² Inspiration for this piece was drawn from reading a writing acquaintance’s work (it was a poem). She wrote of a similarly yearning of family coupled with generational disillusionment.