by Madison Xu
On her birthdays, my great-grandmother asked for summer.
Waited for hot rain to fill the empty rice paddies dried by winter.
Back when even the poor village women bound their feet,
sacrificed their deftness to teeter in the ways of the rich,
my great-grandmother untied her own,
peeled white bandages from her soles
that should have been like a second skin,
and let the mud of the rice paddies swallow her toes.
My great-grandmother asked for home
from the unwrapped corner of a sweet bean bun,
the first bite that bounces back on aching teeth.
A midday cloud that disperses the blistering hum
of heat that lies stagnant over sorghum fields,
all stalks that kept from sight the bob-bob-bobbing heads
of running children, and later
the muzzles of smoking guns that crack open
unborn pods so that they too bleed red.
My great-grandmother’s husband was shot dead by bandits,
the hooves of his own frightened horses pressed his back into
the cold face of the Changbai Mountains.
No one knew what happened until a few weeks later when
they found him face down, his limbs stiff
from the unforgiving Jilin winter and rigor mortis.
Suddenly, my great-grandmother became a single mother with
almost nothing to her name.
My great-grandmother asked for peace
between clasped palms, and found a battlefield on her doorstep.
There was no peace,
not when hunger curled feral and lawless in empty abdomen,
when pieces of homeland were stolen like night
steals a waning crescent,
and people turned their backs on a falling dynasty,
replaced their plows with strife and napalm.
After that, my great-grandmother rode her horses bareback,
pulled her hair back with grenade pins instead of bronze fa jia.
held one pistol in each hand,
pressed white knuckle on metal trigger, and
learned that she could stop a bullet just by
wielding one.
My great-grandmother asked for country
but instead,
was handed the ruins of one,
still raw and breathing, blue viscera that lay open
and hemorrhaging in her palms.
She tried to put the parts back together with her own tired hands,
but how could she?
She was only a woman from a small village,
who asked for rain, and home in the form of sweet bean buns,
where peace lay in the juncture between the fluttering of eyelids.
If only I could tell her that all her wishes were not broken
promises. That her great-granddaughter would walk on a country
sewn back together, fingers heavy with a speeding pen instead of loaded pistol,
hunger a stammered syllable on fat greased tongue.
Behind wilting candles,
she too asked for summer.
