i am as stubborn as the milk-blue patience of oyster mushrooms pushing through damp leaf-rot overnight
1. i am rooted but i flow* =
cải chua sweating salt in a cloudy jar, fish sauce drying sweet-metallic on the wrist, garlic bruised under the knife, mustard greens sinking into sour water the way grief learns preservation. a witchy professor forest relic, dark emerald spellbook energy, tiny literary dragon hoarding gross-tender little lunar cyst poems and student drafts. people with privilege get to leave when things harden around them; i am left looking resentful because responsibility grows roots through ankles: passports bloom where some bodies blister. i stand ankle-deep in caregiving, tendon threaded to hospital light, rice steaming for a mother who forgets her knees. Tiger Balm ghosting the wrist, knees clicking against pearl-slick kitchen tile. A is not B but the emotional shape feels familiar: your leaving wears my father’s silhouette badly, sleeves too loose, still the body flinches, not the same knife, only the old shine of metal in another doorway.
2. i am rotted but i ferment =
you chose yourself when i wanted us. mango lassi salt-sweet at the lip, your voice still warm on the phone. and still i ask if i would have left too had safety opened its hand to me. but i stayed. ở lại – until the mouth turns chua. rage + grief + envy + betrayal braided like daikon sweats sugar-cloud into vinegar, jar breathing sulfur, lid buckling softly in the cupboard, sour blooms under the tongue. we learned to scan for who leaves before they leave, embarrassment is grief wearing another face to survive this bone-soft room. performative reassurance arrives after hurt is already curdled, vinegar too late to stop the souring.
3. i am rotted but i flower =
choosing yourself is not automatically abandonment, but when abandonment raised you, the body confuses fungal bloom for prophecy. i guard unfinished essays like wet hatchlings, red pen teeth, cardigan smelling faintly of rain and old paper, green chrome nails flashing as student drafts molt warm in my lap, small dragon nesting in annotation margins, small permissions – còn lại – what remains alive. hope is embarrassing only in hindsight; i know this now, wiping my face in a campus bathroom stall. i am as stubborn as the milk-blue patience of oyster mushrooms pushing through damp leaf-rot overnight, soft as skin after swelling. but some swellings burst and do not punish the skin for surviving pressure. pus-light under the skin giving up its small moon.
*Virginia Woolf
what if guilt is a greenhouse
i want to write a report on guilt but the form keeps sprouting
into something softer like a houseplant that refuses its assigned corner
i say guilt and it opens a drawer i did not install
inside is my mother asking when i am coming home
and i begin softlocking answers that sound
like insects trapped inside a swollen peach
i am delayed by fog i am delayed by a version of myself
that does not return on schedule
the data is unreliable because i keep growing it
i graft her imagined disappointment onto neutral sentences
i water a tone that may not exist
when she says okay i hear a small collapse
i cultivate it i trellis it up the wall until it looks architectural
when my uncles talks about his children
he wants to release them like a well trained bird
he wants distance to photosynthesize into a life
i try to believe in that climate
i try to root in a place where leaving is not a moral event
but my body composts every departure into something dense
and useful for future self accusation
even now gender behaves like volunteer mint
appearing where nobody planted it
crossing boundaries i did not authorize
refusing the labels pressed into nursery stakes
i am almost forty and still inventorying permission
i prune my days into shapes that resemble obedience
even my freedom has a caretaker voice narrating it
be careful be grateful be near
what if the guilt is a greenhouse
i constructed from guesses
what if she is not inside it at all
what if i am tending an empty conservatory
where ghost orchids bloom without witnesses
and pitcher plants keep mistaking flies for answers
polishing salt-bloomed lens until i can see myself
clearly enough to apologize
this report proposes that guilt behaves like a familiar animal
it follows it waits it learns the sound of your keys
it does not require religion only repetition
only a soft chair where it can sit and watch you choose
the only other thing is nothing
which i keep misplacing
have you seen my booger
it was small and precise and briefly mine
i examined it like evidence then lost it to the air
this is how i handle most artifacts of the body
i locate them i assign meaning i misfile
i am trying to live a life that does not overinterpret its own mildew
i am trying to leave without narrating the leaving
i am trying to let her voice arrive as itself without cultivating extra rooms for it
the monstera keeps splitting itself into newer versions
without asking whether division is damage
for now i keep the greenhouse
for now i sit inside and note the moss learning the shape of abandonment
for now i watch philodendrons climb toward light
without asking whether they deserve it
for now i practice opening the door and not calling it betrayal
Jax NTP teaches critical thinking, literature, and poetry at colleges across California. They serve as Poetry Editor for The Ear (IVC) and Indicia Lit. Their words appear in Apogee Journal, Berkeley Poetry Review, Breakwater Review, Santa Clara Review, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. They are the author of In Bones & Tentacles: How to Pivot When You’re Paralyzed (Moon Tide Press, 2026). Read more: jaxntp.com. IG: @jaxntp @jax.ntp.poet.