Mother-Daughter Tea

Peach-flavored tea, my first
real taste of soft aria.

But the leaves could not
predict Sara’s asking if
girls’ genitalia were boys’
just inside out
because It hurts to be inside out.

Because it hurt to be outside-in
with no roadmap
to get ourselves to where we
know consent
before our mothers’ heartstones
began breaking
open our bodies on the pale
pink of their shame.

My friend,
uttering her pains too plainly
as if we weren’t sitting
at our mothers’ broken hearthstones.

There is no roadmap here,
only memory’s return
to teabags pumped with peach,
my first unreal taste
of our bodies steeping in cups
of pinks that could force an auditorium
of grown thrift-suited women
to tears.

 

Tree Ring

Stay off the deodar
was my father’s constant warning.

We only understood, my younger sister and I,
that the lowest branches had been cut.

It was a veil,
the fairy dusters casting blooms over the

chain-link fence, the crepe myrtle
daily pouring libation on the house that never

stopped cracking, the foundation splitting
even then. We were sun-dark gladioli.

We were sudden cuts drawn
from the pampas grass spears we spirited

from the neighbors’ yards,
and what did we hide?

The leaves were already calling back our
dreams of sleeping in the tree

sunk in the earth in 1934 after the wildfire
and the rains and the La Crescenta foothills

made new memory out of storm drains,
houses, parks, cars, but never enough—

My sister got married, moved east.
A letter came, the house sold.

I climbed the old tree while I could
and saw them out there, cresting,

a ring on the hand of every few streets,
another deodar, briefly, for somebody else.