The Hand That Taught Mine Before It Asked Permission

Nasrin pressed her scarred wrist to mine at the vat’s rim and taught me heat the way water teaches stone — without asking.

Seven months she let me only watch the third reduction turn, the color changing when it chose to; no one asked it to hurry.

She gave me the fourth one morning with no deed drawn between us, no witness sent for, no clerk informed, no hand raised to be asked.

I did not learn until years south of her that her own mother poured this same blue into her palms, in a quarter no map will name —

a lineage that answers to no roll, carried through women only, and never once, in three generations, was any of it asked.

The saffron does not care whose grandmother dyed with it first. The indigo does not remember being asked to become indigo at all.

What is given entire is given the way a river gives itself to a delta — not by deed, not by seal, not because an office thought to ask.

Tonight I pressed my own wrist to a girl’s, at my own vat’s rim, and taught her heat before I had asked myself if I meant to.

Somewhere an Archive is cutting a new line for what it cannot follow. I could tell it plainly: we were never keeping this for it to ask.