September sheds a calendar of unemployed leaves
\nalong the plain\u2019s open palm, scatters their dead music
\nlike dice across the cross-hatched lumps of ground,
\nwhere the fingernails of dawn crawl through the morning
\nyawn of dew, scratch and grip my grandmother\u2019s thirsty
\nankles, the worn-out soles from her brown, diabetic shoes.
\nHer nightgown-knees burrow through the border
\nof the lemon tree\u2019s shadow, her small shadow spills
\nfurther in, as she separates a web of tangled, low-hanging
\nbranches, decapitates the least shriveled lemons, and loads
\nthem in a bowl before the sun\u2019s afternoon autopsy begins,
\nbefore another day passes, and the backyard armies
\nof anonymous insects carve colonies inside their acid skin.
\nFrom the kitchen table where I sit, slumped near the torn
\nand heat-warped window mesh, I watch her stout
\nand crooked vertebrae pierce the faded, flower-patterned
\nthreads, uncoil carefully from its arched position,
\nfrom that steep and sharp angle at which her spine
\nused to hunch over Midwestern fields, sorting through
\nacresful of small, ambiguous crops, while at a few cents
\nan hour, at a pace that was still young and fast enough
\nto resist the urge of standing up, she\u2019d stack another large
\nbasket, bucket or box, and like a foosball figure moving
\nback and forth, zigzag through a patchwork of farms
\nwith another harvest to pluck, refilling the inheritance
\nof her daily quota back to the top. Still, even muscle memory
\nforgets its intended purpose, and like rows of fallen
\nand forgotten citrus bulging through their sunburned skin,
\nshe slowly grew out of her migrant flesh, shedding it
\nbetween the castrated pores of soil and the housing barracks
\nshe emptied out at the end of every summer, aware though
\nthat somewhere down the road, she\u2019d find herself bent
\nat the feet of someone else, even if was just herself
\nkneeling to the older woman she became, to the way
\nshe strolled like a broken grocery cart back in, tipping
\nthe bowl from her Rorschach-shaped hips, and flooding
\nthe table with the future lemonade she\u2019s picked;
\na green and pock-marked tide that never seems
\nto end. And despite her shrinking stature, the fact
\nthat her back has retired into a stay-at-home posture,
\nthe subtle movements in her body language haven\u2019t
\nlost a step, haven\u2019t stopped the lines on her forehead
\nfrom gesturing I squeeze the pulp with my hands, drain
\nthe thin, sour blood her jaundiced-colored tongue no longer
\nhas the patience to lick, as her palate has become too old
\nand comatose to fix, and her wrists too weak to slide
\nthe bag of sugar I slide over, pushing it closer to the pitcher,
\nwhere like a child unfamiliar with packaged plastic,
\nshe tears it open, and pours not a pinch, not a spoon,
\nnot a cup, but enough to resemble the untouched sands
\nof a mapless island; a gulp of what I imagine
\nshe once imagined as paradise, as she tries to taste
\nthe sweetness of her mix, as she smacks for flavor
\ntill the unfelt saliva dries like paste around
\nthe chapped ruins of her lips.<\/p>\n
September sheds a calendar of unemployed leaves along the plain\u2019s open palm, scatters their dead music like dice across the cross-hatched lumps of ground, where the fingernails of dawn crawl through the morning yawn of dew, scratch and grip my grandmother\u2019s thirsty ankles, the worn-out soles from her brown, diabetic shoes. Her nightgown-knees burrow through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[12],"tags":[25],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-241","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10061,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7937\/revisions\/10061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}