Sustenance

by Trina Das

My mother brings me a cloudy, plastic container

packed with yellow gold kernels of rice, sweet and

delicate and speckled with strands of saffron.

It may as well be a loaded gun. I scrape

it into the bin with a fork once she leaves,

saffron strands and all. Time

slips over me like syrup. I see my arm:

an undone roll of Pillsbury dough, glazed

with slick, raw yolk. I feel my jaw:

made so heavy by its sac of blubber

that I must strain to stay upright.

When my skin breaks open, I bleed oil.

The mattress is less of a mattress and more
of a mausoleum. Powdery, escitalopram white.

The nurse scolds him for pressing

his palm into mine, soft and full against my

birdlike bones, and for kissing my cheek

in the wet, shapeless way that teenagers do.

This is a hospital, she tuts. There are rules. Yet

she maintains a note of amusement

at our clammy, interlaced fingers,

at the fact that, even when young people

are dying, they still can’t keep

their goddamn hands off each other.