Self-Portrait as Tea Bag Split Open Over My Grandfather's Woodblocks

I.

Tea bag split open on the kitchen counter. Brown leaves scattered like ash like the wooden blocks your grandfather hid beneath the house. Each letter carved backwards so the truth could bloom forward.

A bee heavy with yesterday's nectar crawls across hot pavement. Block by block the city cooks itself to fever. Even she knows this is holy ground— where small wings still choose to land.

II.

You said the concrete holds ghosts. Every slab poured over another slab. The original roads buried but still breathing underneath.

Watch: the bee stumbles between sidewalk cracks where jade plant tea someone spilled last summer still stains the stone green as unspoken grief.

III.

In my mouth: bergamot bitter as the news that came in brown paper. In my mouth: words your grandmother carved into kindling when kindling was all she had left to speak with.

The wooden blocks scatter across my table like dice after empire played its hand. Each character gouged deep enough to survive burning. Deep enough to bleed ink onto paper thin as your mother's letters that never came.

IV.

Look at the nest: two white eggs waiting for heat that may never arrive. But she builds anyway— grass and wire and hope, mapping her small country in the space between branches that bend but refuse to break.

Your pencil traces the photograph's borders. Occupation lines drawn over and over until the paper nearly tears. But see: even now the eggs gleam like promises that some songs cannot be colonized.

V.

The tea bag bleeds brown into clear water. The bee lifts from concrete, disappears into the space between what was documented and what actually breathed.

In the pavement: blocks of memory cooling in evening air. In the nest: two white worlds waiting to crack open.

In my hands: these wooden letters that spell your name in a language they tried to bury beneath their roads.

Tomorrow someone will find these blocks, will wonder what stories the wood remembered. Tomorrow the eggs will hatch or they won't.

Either way— this insistence on building home in the unmappable spaces. This stubborn blooming between the cracks.