Reading smoke

She used to know the split, the opening, to find sweetness. Dappled light between

us now: the garden still grows small sweet tomatoes. something sharp beneath the vine.

Openness was once a thread we didn’t notice. Now I see where it was sewn, the gaps it left

when it unraveled. Grandpa’s voice is a boat crossing water in the fog. Grandma stands on the

other shore, reading smoke. She says: we are old things, no need to use money on us. She wants to

become less. This is the arithmetic of her love, subtraction dressed as grace. The cracked

yellowing bowl stays there for decades, its chipped rim a twin to the hearing aid that dusts in our

asking. I remember the light on her face like water. Now her face is a window someone painted shut.

All my words are birds flying at glass. The same soft collision, falling. Sometimes I see the green and

red sweet tomatoes cradled in her palm, soil still clinging to their skin. My chatter still spills in her

ear while she picks up cabbages. My words shimmered light, now there’s only glare. In the call her

mouth closed and opened like a fish in the tank behind the screen. Camera cropping her face at the

cheekbones, wrinkles mapping her skin like tributaries, age spots scattered like seeds across her

temples. Grandpa's voice booms through the static, filling my eardrum while she shapes syllables

that die before they reach the phone. Then Grandpa leans toward her, his mouth close to her ear,

and translates back to me, his voice carrying what hers cannot. A bounce back of hair ties on finger,

far enough it either breaks or slingshot back. Everything spills, everything falls back to earth, this

pile of almosts, this compost of what she keeps broken.