Liminal Blue
I wheel my baggage by means of an empty airport, echo
melancholy like a dream I forgot upon waking.
My grandfather died two years after my mom.
At 22, all I believe is dying. However now I’m flying
to go to Nai Nai. I examine Mao cresting a wave
of forty million ghosts. Don’t save them, he mentioned
after suicides, he mentioned by means of famine, compelled
labor, feared baseless executions.
China is such a populous nation—it’s not
as if we can not do with out a few folks.
Forty million deaths as Mao ascended—
if a physique falls within the forest, and nobody hears,
did it make a sound? If a lady amongst thousands and thousands
dies, and nobody remembers, did she matter?
I maintain making an attempt to recollect whom historical past forgot,
really feel their strain at my temple like a silenced gun.
My grandfather on his deathbed weeping
for the daughter he misplaced—my father’s sister, turned
manufacturing facility employee for the revolution—at 22
a morsel of idealism ripe for consumption.
He got here house to her coat hanging, pockets flush
with questions. Later, physique fished from a muddy river.
Silence hangs heavy like grapes grown in shade,
black clusters that bitter however won’t break away.
Earlier than, I’d heard of her solely from my mom.
On his loss of life, one much less individual to hold each.
Now the home is gone, the river is gone, the city empty
of household, scattered like reminiscences unwritten.
The summer season after my mom died,
touring with my father beneath heavy skies,
limitless planes and trains and buses transporting us
away from the final second of her alive.
The final journey: a water park close to Huang Shan—
rides delayed, offended vacationers demanding solutions.
A raft had caught. A employee dove in, tried to repair it.
I think about she should have been a powerful
swimmer, like my useless mom’s useless brother.
Silly peasant woman, somebody spat. No life
jacket. One other requested me, Did you see the physique?
No extra rides immediately. Our cash wasted.
I watched a butterfly, its wings an uncanny iridescent
blue, the one colour I keep in mind all summer season.
Jenny Qi is the creator of Focal Level, winner of the 2020 Metal Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems seem in The New York Occasions, The Atlantic, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Evaluate, and elsewhere. In dialog together with her late mom’s writings, she is engaged on a hybrid assortment titled Liminal Our bodies and a memoir of Las Vegas.
Header picture by Matthias, courtesy Pixabay. Picture of Jenny Qi by Marc Olivier Le Blanc.
