Poetry

don’t sob at the sight of your grandfather’s ashes
stored in a mausoleum for war veterans and husks
of grandfathers that once loved but have since formed
their hands into oysters. He powdered the pearls. South
of the Greyhound station, you once ate biscuits, drank orange
juice against the violet dayglow of the morning. You try

to recall what stories he said back then, but no amount of trying
unbuilds the mausoleum that houses how you see him now—ashes
long since cooled, knuckles long since calloused. Look at the oranging
picture they set beside his wrinkled lilies, the one where he held the husks
of three doves lined in a row, bellies slipping out of slits. In the South,
a man is nothing more than the pain he could inflict. You can form

anything into a marriage of shame and silence. Pick a wife with a curved form
and lips of sweet meringue, whose dreams are just as soft and shallow. If you try
to leave your birthright, remember your stepfather whose crew in southern
Vietnam traded Polaroids of heads and ragged entrails as currency—ashy
cheeks, eyes somehow always looking up. They were just carrion, husks.
Look at your stepfather now—a man who holds more pride in Agent Orange

than in birthing two daughters—and how he once spat clustered bombs of orange
napalm on weeping village wives. He goes to sleep so easy, like forming
a fist. You must be like him, like your grandfather, like the carob husks
of Morocco whose purpose is to wrinkle and burn and become powder. Try
once more to leave your birthright, to never become deciduous. Even the ash
that holds the Nine Worlds in its womb, even the palo verde of Southern

California that dances like fireworks or arteries, even you, one day, south
of heaven, will become a mausoleum. Think of your mother, her orange
blossom tea and her lacy summer dresses and how she made the world her ash—
tray after her lips deflated and her skin leathered and she couldn’t terraform
her womb to support two daughters. Your stepfather did his best. He tried
to be good. You must empathize, since you too feel that gravity (the need to husk

something from its shell, like the wives and daughters who strip husks
of rice with warm hands and leathered feet, who live in huts in southern
Bangladesh with hopes of never seeing a single plane in the sky). Try
to remember how easy it can be to leave, to smoke a carton of orange
Pall Malls in a rusting cerulean pickup like your birth father did, forming
fingers into snakes or oysters or carob pods still hooked to the tree. You can ash

that cigarette anytime. Try as you might to escape your birthright, husks
of doves and daughters are expected so that your own ashes can rest, south
of heaven, where oranges will blossom, where a mausoleum will form.