Waterlogged

The leaves in the tea bag  slowly become  waterlogged nothing

As the heart and the blood and the bile  are sucked out of them.

Osmosis is a silent killer.

The boiling water becomes golden brown Honey lymph

Mama always said take out the bag before your tea gets too saturated.

So I throw it away.

And the leaflets shiver

In the lonely polyethylene.

They are horrified; unable to think.

The water pierced their dark quartz-emerald skins

Reached right in  as if they were ghosts

Gutted them of everything

Powdered their innards up

To look posh and pretty

Painted them with sugar and sent them to sea

With a pseudo-warm goodbye.

And a sigh into the hot spring ocean oscillating inside this tea cup

And the leaflets lay

With their stem-legs still splayed

The water is a hungry boy

A malnourished boy

The kind people say

Is just being a boy

The kind they say is just doing what any

Boy would do

Those leaflets were so

There,

So

existent

These leaflets are innocent girls

The kind that make people say

They should’ve been more careful

And they shouldn’t have worn

Their xylem like that,

And they shouldn’t have exposed their vascular systems

Under their skins slimmer than paint thinner

Really, could that have changed anything?

The water would have reached it anyway

Stolen everything just as effortlessly

Stripped them of their skin

They were immersed in it all

And they could not swim away.

And this tea is a solution

The water

Combined with the liquefied organs of these

Leaves

And my mama brings the cup

To her lips and drinks

What happened to her

Years ago

And drinks what happened to me

When I was still an unripe fruit

Broken by fingers I deemed worthy of trust

That deemed themselves worthy

Of taking everything

Like water

Leaching the tea leaves.