My Grandfather’s Memory Is a Place I Have to Visit Alone

by Rowan Tate

Once you served me stale tea in cracked ceramic

and I sat there posing with the mug

as liquid leaked down my arm, both of us

pretending the water was warm.

War is a mouth: open, sour, rimmed with teeth

that knew our names. It fit you easily into it.

I remember you in the places my skin tightens

for no reason. My arm knows the ritual.

My mother warned me about the birds that nest

in the mouths of broken men. I go through life

stammering in the lint-blue syntax of worry

to keep them from pecking and perching.

I learned the spelling of my name by migration,

from a country I didn’t previously know existed

that taught me how to pronounce it correctly.

They look at me like I am a bright orange creature

as I invent new ways to exit a room. I’ve worn

so many skins to get here. You’d know. Memory

is a mouth: yellow, slack-jawed, a steam-sticky hollow.

Sorrow makes a good fossil. God waiting in the throat.

I dream of aging with apricot skin in my teeth,

sweet stringy flesh stuck between my molars

as I wait for someone to visit. The tea goes cold.

As I wait for some younger version of myself.

Desire prickles like an insect inside me, fuzzy antennae

feeling these dark cavities. It is looking for the birds

in my gullet, looking for something I never buried.

I will feed it tea. I will name it Monday.

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Rowan Tate is a creative and curator of beauty. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.

Photo by Yana Gorbunova on Unsplash