Pink-beige shells and coral dust slept deep
inside the limestone that patched the garden’s
edge – pale scars where my mother tucked wild
portulaca into the criss-crossing cracks of earth.
I watched her hands move through the soil
tending bougainvillea, periwinkle, and azure
morning glory shaping boxes and squares
of green against the pale, powdered stone.
White dust settled into neem leaves, tasting
of metallic gummy bears and silt. Even where
charred trees stood still, her thread ran over
a black Singer machine, binding the trellis,
repairing the gaps, making the garden’s absence
look whole. I remember the stones as an eternal
foothold, limestone weathered into patience
beneath the mud-softened body of a fallen leaf.
The shrine of a stem stayed close to the life
underneath, holding roots in place so the
clenched buds could breathe. Even then,
I was learning how matter changes form:
seed into sprout, bloom into scent, scent
into memory. How easily a body remembers
the hunger for what is grounded. It was never
about the taste of the wall, but the urge
to swallow the scent of crushed henna,
to keep the garden from collapsing into
the dry season’s forgetting. Everything
was already changing: white stone into
green leaf, powder into breath, the garden
becoming something that finally learned
how to hold me. And still, we planted
over it, layer by layer, until what remained
was not just soil, but the memory of having
needed roots to stand. Here, the pulse
of the earth is a slow, white throb
a fossilized inheritance of coral and shell
rising to meet the morning glory’s climb.
We sew the gaps with jasmine thread,
until the bleeding sap of the root
turns the limestone into a living thing.