At my grandparents’ house for the summer

Maladaptive

At my grandparents,
the window
which was the balcony
and the clothesline
was my aunt.

The crinkly soil
and the shoots of the choppy plant
in a landslide slant
within the plastic brown bucket
was my uncle.

and the pigeons
were the pigtailed
and snotty bully kids
downstairs
snickering and whispering
through the loopy
canals of each other’s
cottoned ears.

The strewn hollowness
of the squeezed halves
the plastic juicer
clawed
of the
orange’s pulpy
impregnation
were the walls
to which I
resounded my playact scripts to,

as if a neighbourhood bustled
and pulsed and
Polluted
beneath fibres,
silicone
and barbie kitchen set toys.

The eggplants motherly
grandma bosomed
and large hipped
purple silhouette
with green choppy bangs
as stem
Gasped
through the plastic bag
when I was four

and the tomatoes
remained
symbolically
umbilically
stout conjoined twins,
just like in bingo
one of the grandpa’s called
“The number 22,
As two ducklings.”
and “88,
As two fat ladies.”

the numbers were in square doorways
in the ticket,
living adjacent to each other
In scattered apartments

of simple squares,
The pink ticket a pink apartment building
full of everybody
who knew everybody
in a ‘small square town.”

These tickets were then
Folded
by wrinkly but hasty hands
into paper cups with
rings of tea and lipstick,
Or stuffed into the couch’s gaps,
under
the glass top of the table,

like bombed
buried,
Pastry puff crumble like
cement cracked neighbourhoods
like these always do,

and I
around circle coffee tables of
everybody who knew everybody
but were too quick witted
and lethargically grown
for me,

but still knew me
through my inability
to solve
a conveyor belt of math sums
on a whim of looking up

at the ceiling
as the fingers tapped in counting,
Or in my case
at the quenchingly distressing quiet
I maintained,
The tips of my fingers
paced
around the blotched cement top
of the apartment.

A niece’s,
a grandmother’s someone’s child,
a mother’s sister’s,
mingling in locale resignation
at least,
grazing apartment kitty cats
and pigeons in the
mosquito bounty of an
abandoned playground

where the swing set is
wrapped around the pole
like an animal’s hide
on butcher chains
and the benches
are pricked underneath
by more weeds and
shoots,
the borewell underneath
an amphitheatre stage

Within this garden,
once where my grandfather

listened to me sing
about twinkling stars
in rhyming
school nursery books
as I
sat on the swing,
not knowing
how to swing
or count linearly,

like family
didn’t always speak linearly
and whacked their children
to the gritty slashes of a pen
over the fragile pencilled numbers
abruptly paused
as a shameful two dewy drops
rub away the ruled lines
and paper turns soggy
as cereal floats
like lily pads
cupping drops
of pearly milk
in an ethnic mug.

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