Bloodline

Sometimes to bleed is to wake.

Like how the fishmonger unsheathes his blade,

dusting off specks of ice from the gaping eye

of the grouper. Frozen in a state of rambunctious stupor,

suspended in placid remembrance.

Memory’s sweetness cloyed onto an iris,

a sweetness from nights before spent nestled

in the warmth of communion,

of laughter perfuming the air taking me back home.

Home, a hearth of bodies alight.

Home, where selves do not smelt but warm to the

waft of fish steamed by my grandfather.

Steamed from a vision clouded and sweat stained.

Steamed out of generations who lurched nets into the sea out of love,

out of pressing food to lines of hungry offspring,

out to a soup I gulp heartily,

down so fast my desolate gullet burns,

stinging and unceasing because to pain

is to wake and to burn is to 

cling

onto a vision of love.

Onto land even as waves unmoor me,

untether me from the dream where I am

bundled again in the taste of home,

cusped within those wok warmed arms.

I turn from sleep,

parched by aching,

unsated by memory,

and watch as blood seeps.

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