Moist

In the returning-south days, the walls weep first.

Mother’s hand moves through the dark before mine does,

decides the air I'll wake into.

Between the pillow already wet and the pillow not yet dry—

there is no seam, only a permanent middle season

I have lived inside since before I can date it

Mother, is this love

The periphery of your skin reads my thermometers for me,

knuckle by knuckle till we share the one temperature you debugged

without noticing I was burnt & choked.

like the cotton wadding wrapped around the body and stuck to skin,

restraint and forbearance are ingrained

in

the

marrow.

At a height a child’s hand could reach,

theblueporcelain&thewhitemarble&theloud&buzzingfan&Mother’sskin&Mother’s blood.

I knelt, ten, wiping the blood out of the white, the floor

refusing to stay a floor. The blood the marble would not drink, I did.

And still, who else has ever kept me this warm

while I drowned, in this muggy summer—

You tell me you want your ashes settled around me,

the dearest daughter you call me in that same breath.

How do I refuse the love that surrounds me?

How do I evict a love that chose its grave here?

The love is only dense, drizzling, finding a net

porous enough to hold it, softly, in this rainy season—

a melancholy that never dries

after the rain stops.

On the white wall the fungus comes up glistening

and shines, disguised as gentleness.

The rice in the jar has begun to sweat. Mother,

we are the two halves of a window in this weather—

one of us always the cold side, one of us

always the side that clouds, and neither of us

can say which face the water chose, only that it

arrives

between us

and calls itself the same body.