Heirloom

Abstract

Heirloom Samyak Shertok (bio) Ama used to make us pluck her gray hair on Saturdayafternoons. Nana, Jyojyo, and I partitioned her scalp three wayswith braided locks and combed the strands. With ash-rubbedthumbs and fingers, we pulled the silver filaments by root—harvest or weed—and handed them down to her to keep a tally.For one rupee? An extra piece of goat meat? The throne ofher favorite for the weekend? And what did she want? Beauty?Silly woman, you knew time breaks every bangle. I think ofthis as I regard my own gray strands in the mirror. Yours islonger than mine, she says on Viber, once mine was black asmonsoon. I look at hers: now more hay than rain, cortex thathas known more lice and hailstones than conditioner, a loomwhere she wove sickle and moon and tears into a shawl thatkept us warm at night and carried us to this luxurious afternoonon the roof, the sun warming our backs, roasted pumpkin-seed shells underfoot—three children too eager to please theirvain mother. It's been years since I last touched her hair, orshe mine. I remember her massaging my scalp and rinsing itwith the cold well water when I was a naked boy for the lasttime. If I plucked her gray hair now, she'd be a nun poised tooffer herself to her Buddha at last. So I pull one from mineinstead—a yarn I will one day gift as dowry to the daughter Iwill never have. Once her fists were full, Ama would bury thehank of her ashen strands in our vegetable garden: Grow backblack as soot! Today on the other side of the earth I reap—Himalayan Woman, here, your monsoon—a dark filament. [End Page 171] Samyak Shertok Samyak Shertok's poems appear or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Gettysburg Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Shenandoah, Waxwing, and elsewhere. A 2020 National Poetry Series finalist, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He also received the Robert and Adele Schiff Award for Poetry and an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2020. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications