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.