MUZZLE MAGAZINE
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog

Bopomofo Abecedarian [of the bomb]
by Kathyrn Hargett-Hsu

​
Bomb: from the Latin “humming”:
of Greek imitative origin.
 
Putonghua: (we were here first): 炸弹.
To place a bomb in each village child’s
 
mouth, & slick even the dreamed tongue
with gunpower: 狂轰滥炸:
 
firebombs blazed frenetic & indiscriminate;
the villagers scamper—(& used in some
 
dialects to describe
a market stampede.) We were
 
the first bombing people, & we bombed
ourselves: thunder crash bombs
 
gnarled together with cast iron, harvest-incinerators,
audible from thirty miles away.
 
Linguistically, we bodied the bombs,
 
gave the bombs mouths & eyes:
if the bomb fails
 
to kill, the bomb is 哑 or 瞎.
Our bombs were fire crows,
 
fire drakes, flying over enemy lines
to inflict divine, medieval
 
justice. (& of course,
our share of pear-flower
 
guns, crouching tiger
cannons, bombs named after
 
stars.) Eight hundred years later,
 
the bombers had ladies’ names:
Sally laid the general’s thesis over
 
Chungking—Lily swept it
over the civilians—Peggy
 
sharked the civilians, bare-assed,
across the city’s stairs.
 
If you look close at the campaign,
you won’t see my auntie—at least, not
 
in the photo record. All I know is her
thin leg, divorced from her hip,
                                                                                                    
called her death into an air raid’s roster.
She was a child. What a joke
 
to say a bomb is a woman or a divine crow.
They could only bury the leg of their
 
de-eyed girl, lost in the strategically bombed.
Was it Chungking or Shanghai?
 
No one remembers.
Maybe it was Chongqing.  


Kathryn Hargett-Hsu 徐凯蒂 is an MFA candidate in poetry at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets, the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, Belgrade Art Studio, and UAB. Most recently, she received the Barksdale-Maynard Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the 2021 Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming from TaiwaneseAmerican.org, Cherry Tree, Best New Poets, The Adroit Journal, Rust + Moth, and elsewhere.

ISSN 2157-8079
  • Home
  • Fall 2022
  • Submissions
  • Archives
  • Blog