@ the art gallery.

by chloe prasetya

I am facing an open mouth

vessel. The docent is telling us what

transformation takes, that if they’d dug

up a lid alongside, the vessel would be an urn.

In the now we’ll never know. Is anything

large enough to hold my grandmother the length of twilight?

The two handspans’ worth of her hips. 

The length of breath spidered into by silence.

In the last days, conversation always looked like fog, 

stalling like the reek that gathers in the gaps between teeth.

I never knew quiet to tread a tightrope.

There are the people who raised me 

and then the people who raise me up.

In the restitching I am reconstituted. 

I can accept that it first takes a cutting.