fifty-nine days ago I burned joss paper at
my grandparents’ grave, red streamers pinned
and dancing like the sky’s arteries come to light their
mound
of earth,
or maybe just our cheeks. Engraved characters
of our family tree already smudged
by dust and salt, no grandchildren’s
names but
the son’s,
characters already forgotten, all by myself.
A wish: for this story to be more unique,
to burn to nothingness more elegantly, though
even that wish is inelegant, even joss has ash
as its second life to look forward to, can
drift across the village on the exertions
of a hundred families’ wailing and into
a baby’s laughing mouth, whereas this
memory will have nothing but a
sharps
container
waiting for it, ready to swallow the dumplings
we made the night before, folded in three
different ways by her three favorite daughters,
dissolving plastic bags of fake money for the real afterlife
bit by acrid melting binary bit, holding empty space for
the red apple that wouldn’t burn,
the tears I didn’t cry,
the cross my mother bought for $10 at Macy’s
sixty
days
is all you have they told us us gri ving either too much or too little so they told us not to wish for all the poems I couldn’t fin sh about her and her and her yet I am reaching still for inelegant metaphors and sky to let my lungs be the sky to hold her in my breath with all the ash she is becoming compre sed into bone and teeth and clicking tongue just like you are reading this, now