heirloom

 heirloom 

when you first learnt that you said 

vine like wine you didn’t know what to do with yourself.

or rather with your tongue and your lips / your mouth 

doesn’t naturally kiss your w’s 

     neither does it bite into v’s /

viciousness like a vine, dormantly violent / lonely as a doormat

waiting to wrap around something warm / a white woman on youtube 

taught you the difference eventually / weirdly accurate, she sounded more 

like you than you do on a normal day / her wery wery’s doused in the 

playfulness of a schoolboy / but you sound wary when you repeat after 

her, not even liminal echoes could educate you on your accent 

that woman, she knew how greedy capsicums are in their grinning

sheen / could name every vegetable in a hot dish by its right 

name / she might even call the elevator a lift, like you, but better

                        mumbling the leftovers of a history too busy to 

revisit /

 you always took the stairs the last time you lived on the fourth floor, 

funny how you did that despite the omens, despite the ghosts that would soon haunt /

but you learn home is more than the only site of crime /      horror is ultimately engraved into 

your skin like the guilt of having learnt the difference between wine and vine /

dredged over your bones like ash-pale cheese dust / coating your fingers dirty without

a sign of vacancy /

past your bedtime you make friends with the song of your ceiling fan / only 

imagining what little girl had been forced to curl up against the darkness / you carry her with you

feel her hang out next to the overflowing minifridge whirring like a well-fed dog in the night /

 to love is to be haunted and to know the difference between wine and vine is to fuck it up anyways, to accidentally give yourself a lisp out of your need to please / a burn to please

pleasant like the burning sip of soup / you please your ancestors one superstition at a time /

 tell your friends to not snip air with scissors – the only thing you cut through is us / or to bump foreheads twice as a precaution –  lest we should fight / the myth of conflict is everywhere and yet we heal at an unbelievably slow rate, snailing our way into each other’s 

hearts like a hibernation / like a burrowing / bonding 

moment / a learning moment / give me a moment 

and i’ll get back to you on that because

  in my culture you wait a few months before giving your heart away,

and then it starts again / love leaves & we begin again