Poetry: The Stent by Maya Eashwaran

In the beginning, my father finds

a grape in his chest.

 

The facts of the case are few.

A hit to the jugular can end a

grown man. Mothers who haven’t

screamed in years, still refrain.

 

In the valleys, winemakers crush

vats of severed grapes by foot in

order to control the path of

 

destruction. To de-skin, to

marble, to squeeze, to assert

war in each footfall. To shred.

 

My father feels the warmth

before the burning. Inside

his chest, the cavity is quiet

and untraveled and a single

light bulb hangs from a thread

 

above a small writing desk, a home.

The grape lives, learns to read and

write and dance and when my

father coughs a ghost flies from

 

his body and crawls to my door

where I lie awake in a purple

mist, the figure prying my

fist open like fruit, like

 

offering. In the beginning

we let the grapes be. They

swelled and grew knobbed arms

and legs and we watched

them live and we watched

 

my father’s face grow skinless.

And who am I to blame it,

the grape, in my father’s concave

body, the artery and the skin and

 

the air and the mother’s

short shriek, the battlefield under

my stomping feet shaking.

 

In the beginning, a grape sits in

my father’s heart. It is warm and

outside, so cold. Who am I to blame

it? Who wouldn’t want to stay

awhile?