by Maria S. Picone—수영

my grandmother scrawls a poem,
thin uncertain lines: tomatoes, basil, salt—

oh, how she could open her
self like a downward dog & flower

hibiscus instructions I long to read,
pathways to buds that taste only

bitter assonance—that craft, those stanzas,
how they break—

how memory touches us, how we touch memory

fractures like the mug she shattered fell & once,
I microwaved her gold-rimmed teacup,

lightning storm of synapses & blue veins, tender,
misfiring words I watched as she erased

one daring bon mot for another, image laid on image
as she stopped

blooming, as her writing hand
trembled—as her writing

trembled.

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Maria S. Picone—수영—is a Korean American adoptee who won Cream City Review’s 2020 Summer Poetry Prize. She has been published in Ice Floe Press, Bending Genres, Whale Road Review, and more, including Best Small Fictions 2021. She has received grants from Kenyon Review, Lighthouse Writers, GrubStreet, The Watering Hole, SAFTA, The Speakeasy Project, and others. She is the prose editor at Chestnut Review. Her website is mariaspicone.com and Twitter is @mspicone.