Fifty years after the war

2021 Robert and Adele Schiff Award in poetry

2 Minutes Read Time

Photo by Chris Karidis on Unsplash
grandma unfolds her dress, & 1967 patterns
into life, its story mapped in provinces, in

families splayed naked on a dusking weave. The dress
is handsewn, seaming bound by restitching. Lilac & rhubarb

threads haphazard & layer threefold along the waist
like fingers of smoke. Mesmerizing, because a dying fire

is a spectacle. The dress of a hometown documenting
every small violence. Back in Beijing,

the dress glints the edge of a forest of chain-link
necklaces. Hollows of freshly minted faces,

dug-out walls where anything could hide, even
dreams. The dress hidden behind Mao’s head.

Wire—weak as it was—held its shape: girl
turned ghost, hunched, sidling dark, avoiding

sound. An iron ring beats the window
of memory. The dress lies bare on the bed, recounts

this country’s autobiography. In the cotton: a faint
outline of a family waving from stone steps. Their

house burns above them. Roof tiles splinter,
cave, the crackling beams gnawing

blackened threads. Iron mark on the lace unmistakable.
But who am I to judge the feeding habits of other animals?

To judge the relative virtue of stone through glass. To question
flaming red silk flapping in a speckled swath of night,

smoke billowing through the window,
soldiers standing on the street, arms open to receive

the ash & its children. Every dying fire is a spectacle,
& in the nearest government building,

the ground’s littered with iron rings.

Read more from Issue 19.1.

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