years since war within you

martyred into a malignant lump—the rot

eroding into buckshot, your body flattening

like a thornless rose between bibles. your frame

was wisped into a smokescreen plastered

to the hospital bed & under the white sheets,

you disappeared into an antiseptic cloud. even then,

your pain could not be sterilized—until

we picked up the incoming call & your daughter’s knees

thawed into oil, greasing over the laundry as her prayers

stiffened the cotton. for the first time, we mourned

the cut-down elm you used to read poetry under,

condemning the carpenter’s steady winter saw, 

the revving of its metallic teeth. at the dinner table, 

your favorite lotus root soup numbed cold, our eyes 

glossy over silence. my ma, shrivelling

on the plane windowseat, boned the eulogy

onto crumbled paper, baptizing grief as nothing holy

sprouted from the clouds. we stayed in the apartment

you secretly bought in her name, sleeping under plastic

dust covers, the heaters broken. at the funeral, i stared

at every arrowed letter of the bible. We bound the bark

of your rough hands to hazy memories. until aunt zhōu

gripped my freezing hands with hers & dragged me

outside. we watched sparrows chirp in the mud

as you reduced to ash. when the taxis arrived, our relatives erupted

into wuhanese. i shut my eyes until ma elbowed me into a car, 

both of us coughing tears in the musk of secondhand

-smoke. as we passed uncle’s lotus pond, i glimpsed

the blackened stalks, crinkly heads hanging like sad children

punished with loneliness. the promise of war—

what accompanies it—already lives inside me.