The Jade Bonsai Will Kill You First If You Let It Vriddhi Vinay

Vriddhi Vinay

1. Amma used to catalogue the cycles of when the orchid in the sink’s window would bloat and collapse. By week two, when it had gone roach back from drowning, she coaxed it into accepting patience as its feeding: two ice cubes in its soil a week, left to melt over hours of the sunlight turning the dripping faucet under a prism.

2. Everything green that enters my room browns a little but never dies. The jade plant by my bed and white women’s envy of my violence rest as outliers.

3. When they lock eyes with the men who follow us home and say “I feel like a piece of meat” and

I say “I always feel animal. I was birthed from a shrub a different genus and never bottle-fed past somewhere subhuman to barely human. I am scared how comfortable I am with this discomfort” they nod that they understand as if I was kidding.

4. Amma missed one week of ice cubes and, tenderly, the orchid grew brittle. She understood to let it go before its stalk grew limp.

5. Whenever a new set of hands are allowed on me, my favorite slutty game is to tease if they’ll flutter off me if I refuse. I’ve evolved so, so used to my chest speckled from sucking after both permission and denial.

6. Tall brown girl, vixen shaped, you are so tiny in their hands. How dare your lineage has survived through anger’s preservation but you are never not supple. Oh, how they reject devouring a woman on a plate when the knife slivers her to dress atop some chickpeas, naked.

7. Amma killed every jade cutting I had forgotten when I left for college, neither over- nor underwatering. I think this was her miner’s canary for saying the daughter who knew how to make things grow, who could alchemize one life into another, had just passed.

8. The boy who did not let me leave as that swollen hour passed, counting the ceiling tiles on my stomach, graduated. Passed. The mint plant I’d blend to feed the hands permitted to confide in is now barren and useless. Passed.

9. For every man who I’ve been told is of my same species, white women tell me they lick their lips in anticipation. I think they forget when they dine I belt my stomach until it draws into a figure eight incapable of cannibalism. Hours pass. Days. My saliva dries in strings and threads my lips shut. I’ve emaciated until the bones armoring my torso protrude like a harp. White woman, slowly, weave my threads between your fingers like a braid and play the saplings a song. Salvage what isn’t of womankind into song for something left innocent.

10. Amma buys a new orchid. It dies even after the ice. She folds it under the compost, buys a new orchid. It dies. She just bought one that survives only amongst the dust of the dining room table, a faded image of my sister and me in pigtails above the sink as its tombstone.