Tending the Garden

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.

Read more from Issue 21.2.