From & To the Fields Ellen Zhang
Coming to terms with the fields, our backs tenses only when needed. It’s been five years and sometimes you dream in English. You tell me it takes you time to picture home. Sometimes, I mix up my tenses. I can’t remember who came, come, comes first. I always know what season it is, which state we head into, and what our hands do next. Our hands are not beautiful. They are not the fruits of our labor, in the most literal. It’s a good thing, really, since English is our second language. You joke you speak of apples, quite literally. It is summer now, the kind that melts from Saturdays, you relinquish parts of yourself into me, secrets preserved like of the past. We blow white powder, we wish it were dust, off our hands. It flies back into our face, sticking to our teeth, between every tilde, unraveling of shadows in dusk. Last Saturday, we folded sadness into tamales, holding remnants of the promises that we’ve made. This is the pause between exhaustions. Not much survives that dryness of desert. Maybe the thirst for salt. Maybe nothing.
90