Death/Songs

This is a collection of poems I have written in response to my grandmother's illness and degeneration in the last year.

* * *

The Leak

…the brown crawls
through the white unfallen
ceiling tiles
like salt into watercolor,
painful flowers
inside fleshy tissues—
beautiful, cancerous;

my grandmother’s lungs.

* * *

Her feet and the elevator doors

Every time
our neighbors, strangers,
run ahead to hold the metal doors of the elevator,
when silver chair legs are dragged
on carpeted floors
at the sight of her in restaurants,

when she is lifted out of her moving seat
into a real one;

my grandmother’s moments of silence.

She stops
all conversations, stories
of her past, and knows only to stare
at her heavy legs, silent
even to her late sons and daughter’s
eagerness to stay alive in her words—

I never realized
how much she has lost
already, two sons and a daughter
in memories that want to slip
even further with her brown eyes
into the less laborious
blind-eye blues around the iris.

What does she, or I see
reflected the glint
of these momentary metallic surfaces—

the cold iron elevator door,
the impatient glimmer of moving chairs
and the wheelchair handles mirrors.

Is it her static lethargy
loveless silence, or
the portrait of her final loss?

* * *

Beauty in Death

I don’t remember what she ate,
all I recall was

yellow—
because there’s no point of
embellishing the color of vomit. It was
dark, viscous with grains of rice
cascaded down her mouth. Eyes closed,
not cringed,

there wasn’t enough strength
to hold back.

She let it happen
almost naturally, hardly gagged
just small coughs to clear her airway.

Strangely pale and
violet-analogous, her lips
almost the lavender on the shirt
she was wearing, loose and
rippling as her stomach contracted,
purged
complementary colors—
pain
in such beauty.

* * *

Carriage

I don’t want to die—

my grandmother looked at me;
her tarnished
sclera, and eyes moving
like rusted gears.

Three months,
the doctor said
like somehow he saw
her life mathematical;

the angles
of her twisted body looking
for a point of comfort,
and the decline of her body weight
exponential—

I cannot hold her up,

I told
the mother who sought help
carrying her child up the stairs
today at the subway station,

I didn’t even look at the baby
fearing that in those eyes,
in those involuntary
blue inquiries, I would see
just how little life my arms could hold onto—

I don’t want

her loose skin
and lightened bones,
I don’t want to hold her
up, closer to the sky and feel
how quickly
she’d ascend—how
easily I would break…

If only
I could tell that mother
every time
she asks someone to carry her baby,
that she takes a moment
to remember how light her child is, and
how quickly she will become impossible
to hold
in her arms.

* * *

The Emergency Room List

The doctor’s face.
Needles and five vials of blood.
Crushed white pills.
Green fluid in plastic cup—30ml.

My grandmother’s face.
The nurse’s face.
My grandmother’s face trying to swallow the medicine.
Water spilling from the side of her lips.
Her teeth in a grimace.

The salvia and sweat in her cough.
Stained white hospital sheets.
Crumpled hospital sheets, no longer clean-smelling.

My grandmother’s breathing, short and labored.

The electrocardiogram, blue electrodes, ten.
Her body, unblemished.
Her breast, white, healthy-looking.
Her stomach full.

The skin around her eyes, wrinkled and loose.
Her eyes, yellow and bloodshot, staring up.

The intravenous, slowly dripping.
Her gown, parted.
Her buttocks sagging onto the bed sheets.
Her buttocks, soft.

Her smile—

* * *

Her X-rays

She had me feel her stomach
once, at home, when she first complained
about the discomfort. It was warm,
too warm, as if
it contained the body heat of two people.

She said something angry
is growing inside her, impatient hands,
small and multiple, pushing against the
skin, almost stretching it—

The x-rays showed
images of her chest,
her abdomen, her pelvis,
and the spots,
more spots than what I remembered
three months ago.

Her belly a garden
of many self-pollinating flowers, black
and white,
each blossom a hand
of pain growing,
spreading.

Perhaps cancer
is like having a child,
there is
the surprise, the wait, the pain,
and the hospital ward.

What is different
of new life,
and that which now grows inside her?

The part separating from the whole,
a consciousness
inobedient to what the body—the mother, wants.

In the end,
don’t we all wait
for the relief of deliverance, and the spirit
waits for ascension?

* * *

Body/Fear

Grandma
didn’t want my hand,
without lifting her head
she said it was heavy and
burdensome. How
does love become
a burden? The weight of
tender body heat; my hand
on her back caressing
suffocation—

As I lie in bed after
we fucked, I asked
him to climb
on top of me,
outside the sky has turned
dark, his chest heavy
against mine, my hands
pinned in
supplication,

but not suffocation—
I could not
recreate that cold, black
of dying
where even warmth, body,
and love, are frightening.