when clay dries
A poem by Jaweerya Mohammad

when clay dries

grandma’s skin on her arms is soft
like dough, drips
like melted ice cream, paper thin.

I pinch a fleshy chunk, trace the blue river of veins,
inspect the speckles of brown moles across skin
that smells of Yardley and cloves. Grandma laughs;
in her girlhood, she clung to the arms of elders too.

she feigns annoyance and says,
“squeeze into my liver, why don’t you!”
she means to ask how much closer
can I sit, how much tighter can I
embrace her transparent skin,
for it to be enough.

during dinner, meat also falls off bone,
separates
and we call it a delicacy, call it tender.

love is tender too, kind and supple, fluid like water,
keeping bellies full and coating every cobwebbed
crevice, wrinkling and sweetening over time but
outside of home, skin is taut, tight, smooth, 
frozen like cement or plaster. skin is supposed to be
pretty glass, alabaster.

one day I want skin that stretches, drapes like a veil
over the faces of future grandchildren lying in my lap,
as they, too, tug and play with my sagging skin,
trying to number the wrinkles as far as they can
count the stars.

and we will turn to each other and chuckle
as I tell them to scrunch themselves to fit
into the crevices of my elbows, my liver,
the ventricles of my heart,
and they will know love, lasting and aging 
and true.

About the Author:

Jaweerya Mohammad is a passionate educator, having taught Middle School English for many years. Her writing is shaped by her Muslim and first-generation Pakistani American identity. Some of her poetry has been published in the “Third Space” Anthology by Renard Press and the literary magazine Muslim Youth Musings. 

You can find more of Jaweerya’s work on Instagram (@jaweeryajournals)

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