Inheritance

I have been in the garden again—cleaving weeds from soil as if extracting molars,

as if unearthing the marrow of swelling grief.

Each root resists like a memory unwilling to be spoken.

I shovel and heave—not to conceal, but to cradle what time refuses to hold.

Unearthing tender scraps, sour-sweet with the weight of newborn breath.

Grief clings like sweat—my own Sisyphus ritual.

My fingernails split at their beds, raw and red as the day I bore my child.

Earth packed beneath crescents of torn keratin,

blood mixing with soil like suture thread once braided through my own flesh—

tender, torn, where life once pressed its head against my cervix, against time.

The sun leans in, laying its heat across my shoulders,

not unlike the dull throb of a contraction—

blessing me and burning me.

There is brightness—sharp as the flare of a crowning skull.

A sudden bloom of pain.

An unfolding.

I remember the curl of his ear, soft as a petal folding in moonlight.

His cry pierced the hush—an unrepeatable sound.

This thorn bush does not apologize for raking its teeth across my arm—

offering blood in place of milk, offering memory instead of mercy.