The wind pinches my face with its fingertips
on this day not too warm for northern December.
The secret of not freezing is to keep moving.
Superfluous to celebrate a birthday 
after death, yet tears slip from my cheek 
to my tongue—rivulets of tristesse carve 
into my wet skin. I roll down our driveway 
past the dried scat flecked with hay
the miniature loaves stacked haphazardly—
some flamboyant coyote marking its trail.

I pedal to the grocery to conquer 
my exhaustion, to pick up some beets—
I ride to the grocery in defiance, waiting for,
no, baking it!—the opposite of grief.
                        

You always loved watermelon—the gray-pink flesh, 
the juice that runs down your lips
as you bite in.

Your heart, big as a watermelon,
big as the tractor that pulls the melons off the vines,
big as a whole field of watermelons.

At the melon umbilical, the embarrassed underside,
a snail forms—pale, yellow—from crusty scale 
where the melon blanched under the soil as it grew  

while the rest of the skin, veined like a parasol, sums green 
at the nib, belted in deeper green like that skirt
that was your photographic signature.

The melon having lain in the full glory of sun 
clown pant stripes around the body 
its varicose mappings of brown tributaries.

Six eddies of pale seeds the color of pill bugs
divide the flesh. You taught me to chew the seeds
instead of spitting—soft nuts, easy to swallow. 

In that skirt your belly would bulge
at the waistband until it didn’t fit
until it did again but then you swam in it

that final year you shriveled into yourself—
flesh paled and papery 
teeth blanched gray

refusing to chew or spit
jaws clenched in fear
of missing your precious sun.
                        

Someone mentions Remembrance Day
and I can’t help wonder why no one—none of us—
so many children of survivors—
spoke of this back in high school. 

My mother who wanted to know in detail
for each friend I spent time with—
last names, parents’ income, employment, 
what time I’d be home. 

My mother who made it off the last boat to Cuba
my mother who shared a secret language with my grandmother 
my mother who didn’t want me to know what she had seen 
as a young girl but never understood.

Thirty years later on Facebook I learn we were many—
each with our own survivor’s family secret
each with a parent unsettled by a knock on the door— 
the children—friends I swam with—had kept only to the surface.