To be a man

don’t sob at the sight of your grandfather’s ashes stored in a mausoleum for war veterans and husks of grandfathers that once loved but have since formed their hands into oysters. He powdered the pearls. South of the Greyhound station, you once ate biscuits, drank orange juice against the violet dayglow of the morning. You try

to recall what stories he said back then, but no amount of trying unbuilds the mausoleum that houses how you see him now—ashes long since cooled, knuckles long since calloused. Look at the oranging picture they set beside his wrinkled lilies, the one where he held the husks of three doves lined in a row, bellies slipping out of slits. In the South, a man is nothing more than the pain he could inflict. You can form

anything into a marriage of shame and silence. Pick a wife with a curved form and lips of sweet meringue, whose dreams are just as soft and shallow. If you try to leave your birthright, remember your stepfather whose crew in southern Vietnam traded Polaroids of heads and ragged entrails as currency—ashy cheeks, eyes somehow always looking up. They were just carrion, husks. Look at your stepfather now—a man who holds more pride in Agent Orange

than in birthing two daughters—and how he once spat clustered bombs of orange napalm on weeping village wives. He goes to sleep so easy, like forming a fist. You must be like him, like your grandfather, like the carob husks of Morocco whose purpose is to wrinkle and burn and become powder. Try once more to leave your birthright, to never become deciduous. Even the ash that holds the Nine Worlds in its womb, even the palo verde of Southern

California that dances like fireworks or arteries, even you, one day, south of heaven, will become a mausoleum. Think of your mother, her orange blossom tea and her lacy summer dresses and how she made the world her ash—tray after her lips deflated and her skin leathered and she couldn’t terraform her womb to support two daughters. Your stepfather did his best. He tried to be good. You must empathize since you too feel that gravity (the need to husk

something from its shell, like the wives and daughters who strip husks of rice with warm hands and leathered feet, who live in huts in southern Bangladesh with hopes of never seeing a single plane in the sky). Try to remember how easy it can be to leave, to smoke a carton of orange Pall Malls in a rusting cerulean pickup like your birth father did, forming fingers into snakes or oysters or carob pods still hooked to the tree. You can ash

that cigarette anytime. Try as you might to escape your birthright, husks of doves and daughters are expected so that your own ashes can rest, south of heaven, where oranges will blossom, where a mausoleum will form.