riot in this unblooming
the serai started it--
pulling high its white socks and detonating eat this, it said then, my grandmother’s beloved pandan plant whose leaves she used to snip and arch into knots to store in clay pots and steamers-- orchids and langsuyar foresting, fronding bunga kantan punching out of the earth their unclenching fists the pink of half-stewed meat vines glutted like pythons the kumquat bore suns my grandmother and i sat on her doorstep one night flushed with fung yau and the tepid sugar of nescafe dregs we corralled time with airline cards and rounds of sam cheong snatching tens and thirties from each other while everything else slurred in the storm-- the rain that didn’t touch us condensed ground-up to shawl our arms, foreheads, exposed necks turning us pulut-skinned and bathwater sleepy mosquitos cluttered our ears, radio-winged my grandmother slapped herself in sacrifice we lived on the cut-grass surface of a plot that went on sprouting of floods that promised to come-- she knew it dearer than me biting into her spoon through rice brown as the earth that kept turning beneath our slippers-- how she longed for bunga telang blue and meals that fought her back, ulam fragrant and snappish scolding her tongue not those needles digging to where her veins split green who said everything could pretend like my grandmother and i never lived here or that her demure money plant could tip out of its jar, skittering centipedes of hearts unstitching the door frames-- just because i kissed my grandmother and they ran a wheelbarrow over her grave and cauterised her planting space in cement who said all of it could implode, could let go, riot in this unblooming mess, could take over and throw me out when i sat pretty on capsized tiles in the waft of stale rain, in this garden that should now answer to me but won’t |
Nic Tan is a nonbinary Malaysian writer, immigrant, and single parent based in New Zealand. They write mostly speculative fiction in cramped pockets of space and time, which sadly are few and far between anomalies in their everyday life. They can be found on Twitter (@moxieturbine) or on Instagram (@bungarayaisland).