My mother tells me my grandmother has begun to touch
herself. Dress up, hands between her legs, furious & buckling,
& I wonder: how long has it been since she’s been touched
by anyone? Decades, I presume. Does there come a point in life
where you stop craving pleasure or do you learn to no longer
expect it? Her dementia twists things around, makes her believe
she’s twenty-seven, like me, not eighty-eight. But at twenty-seven
she had already birthed six of seven children, was already a mother
& a wife & no longer a child, was she allowed to be a woman?
My mother says seeing her mother like this is embarrassing, she
leaves the room when she tells me about it over the phone so my
father won’t hear, & I bite back my quips. What’s wrong with
desire? She wants to be loved. She is no different than me. Wanting
to be loved, to be fucked. An untended garden wilts, dries up, but
that doesn’t mean it can’t be brought back to life, with the right
hands buried into the soil, sunlight, & water—anything thought
to have died can be resurrected, with tender care.
Jessica Nirvana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet and author of Earthly Gods (Variant Literature, 2024) and the chapbook in the aftermath (Prismatica Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Prairie Schooner, Honey Literary, and elsewhere. She is the publicity and outreach manager for the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts.
Elsewhere on the site: read more about Issue 21.2, and peruse a special folio on writing about sex.
