Literature
fabled life
i.
she talks through her wrinkles,
'i have no desire for food', she says.
i take her plate to the kitchen
noticing how the beetroot shavings bled into the skin of the chicken and brown rice.
it was blood, skin, and bone,
and the rice was a million starlike cells floating between.
this reminds me of my anatomy textbook:
we've been learning what's beneath our skin,
we learned that all cells divide. some cells often don't stop dividing.
other cells divide and stop when they should...
but not my grandmother's.
starlike, they explode, they shatter, they consume
they divide.
ii.
i want to be mad at my grandmother's cells,
but what would that do?
i