my father returned to Beijing and bought
a dozen lightbulbs for my grandmother, replaced each dying
glass tuber drooping from her ceiling, dried up and hollow,
just out of her reach for many months.

She told me on the phone, my apartment has never been so 
bright. In Chinese, I learn to nod with my words.
Your father is a good man…then a silence,
stretched thin like the wisps from a broken lotus root,
like the love she still extends to a man who is no longer her son.
 
I feel her wanting to ask me something stitched and raw
and bursting like the belly of a watermelon, a release
like surrendering a kite into a gale storm.
We both wince silently to ourselves,

is she wondering how things fall apart? I want to ask her:
if the end comes slowly or in one giant collapse, if her throat
ever burns when she remembers how a fact unravels, if
she’ll always carry a murmuring ache

when she pictures my parents and the rest of their evenings,
spent in different hemispheres of the same globe
seated in wooden chairs at the foot of the full-size dining table,
eating their meals silently, both
alone.

Powered by Froala Editor

Powered by Froala Editor

Powered by Froala Editor