Grandma kept clementine peels on her kitchen heater.
The heat wrinkled their edges into petals, petals like the day
lilies napping in the garden, tangerine like the tabby cat
tumbling in the painting on the bedroom wall, Grandma’s
signature scrawled like a heartbeat and it was the painting
I’d study while Grandpa was dying but before they told me
Grandpa was dying, the house smelling, miraculously, of spring.
–
Jen Gayda Gupta lives, writes, and travels in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in One Art, Rattle, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta.