How to make salabat
By Kay Ulanday Barrett
For Cecilia Ulanday Barrett

Hoy! Listen, This is how to cut ginger, it’s a root, she said from
Chicago basement on first snow of the year. It’s the 90’s. Snow is
a big deal. Tear salt missing ocean salt, she cleared her throat.
Based on where we’re from, nothing can prepare us for frozen.
Fast forward: college friend asks How do you make that tea again?
The one you used to drink when it started to snow. I want to say:

My ma is dead. She made this every time it began to snow. I buried both
my parents by age 25. Have you called your mother? Have you checked to
see if there is a tumor slowly living under her skin? What I recall most was
her crying. Which is a lot like making any drink really, a pouring,
which reminds me of something a friend once mentioned— If you only
write about crying and death nobody will buy your books.

What I really do is listen to the same voicemail over and over where
my mother’s throat is miles away. Mouthful of liquid, steeped tea bags
for lungs, just waiting for the right time to let go. What I actually want
to say all the time is Grief is the full-time job. What I say to my
friend only mentions directions— Which leads one to think

about when my mother finally went back, a visit, she coined it, vacation,
which was code for for good. Two weeks later she says in calling card
staccato, I’m in bad shape, anak. Which is migrant code for death.
Words have multiple meanings. My mama taught me that. In essence,
she was my first poetry instructor. This is how mother tongue is whittled dull,
abandoned building, once a home. When mother dies, I couldn’t say that

phrase for years, couldn’t say she’s dead. How in three languages,
I don’t have words for absence. A mouth becomes thud. English becomes
harder to swallow. Did you know, on the worst days I forget what her
favorite song was but the tiny eruption of her cough repeats
in loop all the time now?