My mother buys the tree at the community gardening center. Or rather, she exchanges it for her smaller, dying one, for one where the leaves don’t yet droop and fade like discolored bruises, one that still has the capacity to bloom. She plants it in the plastic pot outside that looks like terracotta but is really a flimsy imitation. When she plants it she promises it will grow with me.
So we sit under the veranda.
She teaches me to weave
my curls into plaits, and we
watch the tree grow.
And when I take a girl to my high school prom, the girl’s fingers make knots in my hair as she spins it in spirals. Soon I will not see this girl again but her finger-knots will be imprinted in the language of my tangles.
When I move out my mother hands me a plastic tupperware full of small fruits like oblong marbles. She tells me to eat one each time I miss home. And I am greedy in my loss. And soon, they are all gone and sticky-sweet juice runs rivers down the crater of my chin and all I have is their container.
And in my college apartment a girl who doesn’t know me lays her hand over my soft exposed stomach in the valley between my hips and breasts. I try not to breathe too violently, try not to let my teeth puncture fruit skin. And miles away under my kitchen window, the branches lean heavy with fruits ripening.
And I let this girl who I don’t know learn the secrets from the softer parts of my dimpled body. And we stand in my kitchen in a dance of cupboard opening and dishwashing. And she is gentle. And I am a wild gazelle, tamed under the graze of her eyes.
I never open umbrellas indoors, often bring up feng shui in casual conversation, and play hopscotch over cracked pavement. I never make anything I must hold like a promise but the first time I do it breaks. And the first time she leaves it is a promise to wait till the fire breaks out in my mother’s kumquat tree. When she leaves the war breaks out in its branches, each fruit hitting the ceramic tiles and exploding like sweet-sour bombs, like warnings.
And this girl tells me she knows
how the story ends, that we won’t
look when it comes to it, eyes turned away
— We the people made of dust. Pretending
all these houses,
each kitchen, was built
as a refuge for the lost and lonely.
And before she is gone
I steal all her words and hide
them under my pillow like lost
teeth for a storybook fairy.
Hoping I’ll wake up
and speak in limericks.
And after she is gone
I keep her words, and I still
dream in rhyming couplets.
I draw out the boundaries of her body like a crime scene on my hardwood living room floor. Some days, I sleep in these borderlines curled like roadkill.
Now I fall in love with each girl who smiles at me, whose eyes crinkle like tinfoil.
And when the water bill comes it’s hiked up into the triple digits. Because now I take long baths where I play god of the bathtub rim city laying siege to shampoo bottle sky scrapers, splashing tsunamis over soap bar housing developments.
I call my mother. She tells me what she will make herself for dinner.
I tell her nothing.
And I sit there on my back porch. And 400 miles away outside her kitchen window she pours salvaged rainwater on her tree. She is still watching it grow.