Inheritance
When we emptied out the house, you wanted to keep everything.
Books no one was ever going to read jammed into a storage unit
with the handbags we could never afford and the photos of everyone
alive. You left for Saigon with his sweaters and a suitcase full of letters
you asked to be buried with. The ink fades where your fingers trace the chin
of each line and you’re beginning to forget what some words mean
in English: epic, majestic, covenant, eternal. What will time make of us?
Years brackish with partial truths, I could almost float on what I don’t
say: I want to get better before I see you again. If I go first, who will help you
feed the spirits? When I call, it’s tomorrow on your side of the world,
the sea at a simmer, the wind readying its fists. You tell me Dì Sáu came back
a swallowtail and helped you make the bed. You’ve been buying lottery tickets.
I know this means you’re afraid to die. This, our only language: omens, unlucky
numbers, butterfly hauntings, tales of women who die weeping and come back
as trees. You make me promise to keep the couch he died on, remind me to give
Pippa the pearls when you’re gone. I look at the oak outside my window,
remember you crouched in the dirt, gloved to the elbows, raining seeds
from your fingers. Someday, you said, this will all be yours.
—Theo LeGro, FCLC ’10
About this Poem
I wanted to explore how grief tethers us together and makes us alone, and,
whether immediate or ancestral, is eternal, inescapable, a burden, and in so
being, ultimately a form of love.
About the Author
Theo LeGro is a queer Vietnamese-American poet and Kundiman fellow whose work has earned nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. Their work appears or will appear in Blood Orange Review, Brooklyn Poets, diode, Honey Literary, Plume, The Offing, Raleigh Review, and others. They live in Brooklyn with a cat named Vinny.
