The heat does not scald but waver, shivering in the threshold.
As pre-migrant, international doves, we barter time by its absences.
I have learned that every exile is an ellipsis, that the red string
is forever mid-knot, a snare of silences and second tongues.
In a mid-December spring, 外婆 skins taro, each peel a quiet obituary,
a thinning blade. She moves like a wheelbarrow
through the backyard, breaking ginger into medicine,
spinning bruises into the weather.
Before the war, her mother once swept floodwater from the doorstep,
stoked rice to a rolling boil over an open flame—
as if fire could unmake deluge, as if the body could outlast drowning.
We trim the wild stems from water spinach, let them spiral in cold water,
watch dirt dissolve into tendrils, into soft unravelings of silt.
She asks if I still dream in her language,
if my mouth still remembers the weight of old vowels,
the cadence of loss curled beneath the tongue.
I say yes, because it is the gentler answer.
Hunger lingers in the hush of steam, in the dull gleam of fish scales
pressed against a blade’s edge. In the morning, she waters the jade plant,
wrings ghosts from the altar’s silk sleeve with a damp cloth.
After fall, I sweep the porch, scatter seeds for another spring.
Everything in threes—everything despite the wreckage—
the transaction of staying, of waiting to be summoned home.
外婆, I think I mistook devotion for survival. I let it curdle in my throat, unspooled like sugar cane fibers
between my teeth. An overripe lychee. I bloom. I rot. I hunger to no end.