Four in the morning, and as always, “Waltz of the Flowers”
rings throughout the hallway: my grandmother’s ringtone
for my grandfather. I listen as his gauzed voice limps
towards her, waiting for my grandmother to snip off any frayed
strands. You know that our children are the only crimes we can commit
to now, she reminds him. Even then, I still imagine
my grandfather as the tiger’s head mounted on the wall in his own
apartment, its regal body waiting backstage of the past tense
like an understudy. My grandmother, who polishes his fangs
with her blue and grey checkered apron. Who lives on her own,
but this is how love is supposed to go: sleeping in different chambers
of the heart. And yes, he had other lovers despite her. His hands,
lessened from being gorged on by a gust of girls. My grandfather
asks for forgiveness by feasting on my grandmother’s food,
pleads for seconds, a second chance at fullness. He peels
the wallpaper off from the inside of every mackerel he devours, bursts
its heartbeat into a doorbell. In the mirror, he tries hailing
his boyish face like a time travelling cab. Whenever I visit, my pale
grandfather clings himself onto me, milk crusting on the lip of an infant
lyric. He always thanks me for looking like my mother, a familiar face
to attach as bait at the end of a family line, reel in fresh griefs.
In my family, a lover becomes his mother. My grandfather coos
through the phone, the way an orphaned letter aches for the womb of a word.
–
Sarah Yang is a Japanese-Korean-American writer in New Jersey. Her poetry has been awarded by the National Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom, and National Poetry Quarterly. Her work appears in Yes, Poetry; Bitter Melon Magazine; and Up the Staircase Quarterly.