Aubade after Nanking
by Sophia Liu

Wai gong was born in the year of the fire ox—the year they 
drunk danced with violence, massaged saltpeter into an infant’s 
lips. In a red-glazed night, they mistook our bodies as effigies, 
our fingers as rose haw, our navels as the bullseye of a darts 
game. Winter had teethed out of a third trimester fall and every
-one was drenched in the secrets from their mothers’ past 
lives. Every mouth wanted something to untarnish them and some
-one other than their own pulse to touch, but we let the wind 
bathe us and tried not to wonder if there was a girl’s hymen in 
the lake. We teared to blur our vision and realized that  
their half-lit faces could disguise so well as our fathers’. So we taught 
ourselves to squint once in a while to differentiate them, though it 
didn’t matter. While not ours, they were still fathers, still disguised 
as noblemen. Then they slipped our skulls underneath glass carpets, 
pretending that the dead disappear. Still winter, the sidewalks 
were filthy with shrapnel and there was no song bright enough 
for even an angel to sing. 
                              I am trying to understand the mass of an acre 
nauseated with madness: how a little boy cries out Ma with 
a voice so sacred but grows into a man who laughs after deflating 
the stomach of a half-mother. I will tell my daughter to always look 
from a distance before crouching closer—to trust the world 
through an aperture. And when she sees her zeng zu mu’s head 
arranged in a grid like checkers, it might as well be an opera mask. 
Because they say what's real is what’s golden, but how could they 
even begin to surgeon out the napalm from wai gong’s stories? I tell her 
that everything real can cleave in half without cracking, can be 
caressed with cut fingers. I repeat that this earth will not forget. 
How could it? I smell sinew in the night market and imagine 
who screamed here. One aglow morning, I comb cartilage 
out of my hair and find the mandible of my mothers. We remember 
through the rubine sunset and every child crying with nowhere to go. 

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Sophia Liu lives in Long Island, New York. Her poems and artwork appear or are forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Rattle, Storm Cellar, Parentheses Journal, A Velvet Giant, Underblong, and elsewhere.