Tender

My sister says tender into the phone

like a woman who believes only in the idea

of woman. She says young tender,

and it is the 1990s and our parents still love

one another and they slow drag in the living

room and we are too young to do anything but ride

our bikes and wrestle in the grass and dream

about being grown, the wonder of another body

pressed to our own. Our father

has the biggest arms and the softest hair in the world.

Our mother remembers everything.

Young tender, and the sky is full

of words; we have only just discovered

how clouds move, what crooning

means, whip appeal, and something is breaking

ground in our bodies. Legal tender.

I am laughing into the phone in a voice that sounds

like crying. I am crying at my sister’s drawl,

drawing tender through two decades and halfway

across the country. My sister a mother now,

holding on to tenderness, though she is afraid

of what her body can no longer do. My father

slow dragging in another town. My mother content

with the idea of memory, with what has been lost.