By Imtirenla Longkumer
Dear Grandpa,
they say nothing lasts forever,
but I think we allow them grandpa, not to last.
Because then, the slaughter is no longer seen, but redeemed.
Holding it, we warp them before it spirals back into something more ferocious than us.
The golden kingdom is scorched down for syrup because power is the pleasure of throwing gasoline over the burning house.
Look,
the man half-drunk is ready to push the woman down the cliff because nothing lasts forever.
But right now, here, I’m dragging you out of the grave,
detaching you from that grotesque place, alive.
Yes, alive, your eyes and spines and arteries, full and formed, and all your pieces together,
splattered in these pristine pages.
A testament to the power of letters.
A gentle rebellion against the grave.
What if I tell you I can trace the creases in your hands with these inks and feel every hierarchy of skin on your palm?
You should see them with my eyes,
look how achingly beautiful they are!
Look how I’ll make everything last forever, even your Death.
I know you loved reading, which is to say that you were a lunatic scrutinizing the edges of the concrete, while the world walked the pavement.
Immersed in gnawing texts by dead people, July snowed down to December.
“Are you even listening?” grandma would yell over the wisps of smoke from the burnt tomatoes and dried fish.
Her words ricocheting in fragments, subtly caressing your ear but not vigorous enough to go reread the same line twice.
I once swore to never wear your skin,
but I hope you know how I’m more your granddaughter now than I was then, when you had a body and a beating heart inside that body.
Should I have left when every image of you became a confrontation of the past?
I don’t know if I’ll live till your images become insignificant to my memory.
I don’t know if I’ll remember you as nakedly as this moment.
I don’t know if there would be a life, to begin with,
but then there is death,
like how death is what defines you now, separating me from you, you who was once alive.
Your throat pulsing as you swallow the hot rice, fingers swaying as you flip the last page of mere Christianity, I swear in that moment, no one would look at you and say, look at that corpse.
But suddenly, you look beautiful dressed underground.
The horizon, your body earthing under such a sky.
But grandpa, since one of us hasn’t made it to funeral,
I’m immortalizing your life and death with the same letters that wrote the books you read.
Remember those Christmas carols?
My little feet dangling between your hips even though I could very much walk my steps.
Your brown polyester sweater raining sweat at the crest of winter.
Maybe it was the weight of another human on your body, the mass pressing you down,
your knees, a porcelain, your breath, burning fire.
With so much chaos in your body, your frail shoulder vibrates onto my chest and
out of the noises, echoes a flimsy hum.
You hummed until the last chorus was sung as though your breath isn’t surging like an angry ocean,
like your knees aren’t shaking like an earthquake.
I never bothered to ask you if you were tired grandpa,
and you never said.
I think now of those days,
how time has sliced our bread and stabbed us at the same time.
Took us by the shoulder and plunged into the ocean.
my memories, there is so much of people from yesterday but not of you anymore
the road we once walked together, now only offers the shadow of mine,
I’ve told you enough, all in a strange and beautiful way,
of all the things you won’t understand, anymore.
But look grandpa,
the world is reading not of a dead man,
but of a presence, of a movement.
You’re dancing in stanzas now, singing in lines.
This poem?
It’s your second life,
because every time someone reads “A man who loved reading”,
you will rise again.