This 5-minute jamu recipe will grant you safe passage
To help me outrun Sunday, mom makes me jamu.
A recipe she’s kept closer than her own saturated blues. It will die
with her one day, but somehow outlive me. First, the ginger.
Keep the skin on, she says. It’s in those winding riverbeds
her past lives drift, abandoned in rusted silt. You’ll hate the
taste, she keeps on. Your tongue will go inside itself to escape
the sting. The turmeric next. It gilds her skin, gold-eye lichen
abloom with ears to the east—she holds stain and ornament
like one in the same. You see, all her years dissolved into my
belly. She learned to spin a storm and spout it clear into my mouth
with hands behind her back. Behind her back is an America that still
believes in honey. She frees it from the jar into the terra cotta
pot like a Golden Gate jumper. We wait as it steeps for a mayfly’s
lifetime over the stove. Licks of flame taking each zest as wives.
Each one recalling my father, a vignette bouqueted by unreliable narrators.
A good story: it takes a village and a villain and an unsung hero.
I’m aware that this cliche owns me. That incarcerated within the faces
of men are fragile countries. Whether they spill milk, tall tales, or iron,
they know little of midnight and barking hounds. And so, the shadow they leave you
with clings like sap. A scorched earth on the tongue. Squeezing a lemon crescent,
she says, Train yourself to find appetite in any bitterness. When I swallow,
my face is as straight as breaking news.