In the Orchard

When the red sun rises over the Hunan mountains,

my grandmother and I stroll barefoot through the rice fields.

The wind chases the sweat on our backs while

farmers dressed for harvest cleave the earth into pieces.

Herons fly toward the sky, singing a hymn for summer,

their white wings turned upwards for some cosmic relief

from the suffocating heat. The bruised light of dawn

kisses my grandmother’s frail body, the drooping folds of her skin

mirroring her crumbling childhood house with no windows

and no door, the straw roof infested with beetles. I touch

the battlefield of scars running down her arm, her palms gnarled

like the currents of the Yangtze. Is she thinking of her youth?

When she watched her mother’s stomach spill endlessly

into a wooden bucket, when the air was a black inferno

that burned her village to the ground?

My grandmother was twelve when she waded through

the yellow river in search of her younger brother,

bullets sailing toward her breathless body like snow.

A month later, he washed ashore face-down

on a mud-slabbed bank. She couldn’t afford

tears or a funeral. Time was an inevitable thief,

stealing her livelihood until she had no choice but to run,

blisters blooming on the palms of her feet, hunger sinking its

sharp claws into the pit of her stomach. My grandmother hid with the dusk.

Drank the story of her own blood. Scaled the mountain of the war

to the place where the sun would rise.

I wonder if my grandmother sees her late brother in my eyes,

if the fish we buy at the local market reminds her

of her mother’s hollowed lips. I wonder if, on bitter winter nights,

she hears the sirens of a country fallen,

thousands of bodies littering the streets like sewage, napalm flowers

wilting in the dirt. As we pass through the shimmering green ocean of rice paddies,

the ghosts of her fingers laced in mine, I want to be

the earth and its sky and sun, clinging to the trees and the clouds

and the two of us

in a tender embrace. I want to bleed warmth into my grandmother,

to erase the fatigue from her eyes. To paint her a world where

she does not have to remember her family in the past tense.

But I am not the earth. I am just a boy, with monsoon hands

and sea-dust eyes and a soft beating heart. So instead

I plant a kiss on my grandmother’s calloused cheek,

her smile the seed and roots of an orchid,

ready to grow, to bloom upwards from the parched soil

and try again.

in the orchard