exodus hong kong
1
listen carefully—there is land or there is water,
and a time where
you may mistake one for another.
there is day and there is night,
the only difference between them
is that a body may pass through one living
to arrive at the other no longer.
2
if by land, you will travel
through the wutong mountains. follow the path
to liantang, cross over in luofang.
bring as much food as you can. remember your name
and where you are going. you will have to say the words
as if you are not starving.
3
at the red marks of painted
stone, by the mangroves there,
I watched once a child searching
the pockets of his father
who laid perfectly still in the summer stones,
mouth filling with the rising river.
4
water is through the throat of baishizhou, across
shenzhen bay. there will be men scanning the paths,
so send your body low and fast
into the long taste of salt. the sea—
it is hong kong's. they will not take
you back from it. it is the first test of the other side's
forgiveness, to enter admitting you belong nowhere,
that you are no one.
5
dandelion, banana skins, the stems of sweet potatoes. to boil
the roots of a mountain fern for its starch. to stew grass until
a dark vegetal paste collects in the pot, and the tongue thickens
with mosses and oils. bright scream of hunger ripping the body
into constellations. famine has a smell—
sunned ashes grey-yellow in the shapeless
winter silence.
6
those that fed on barks and grasses would swell—
flesh holding impressions like clay. how seldom we think
about the substance of our bodies, unnoticed until
it must be endured, red searcd skin heavy in liquid
bloom. it was better when
the people you loved stopped looking
like themselves. like watching a stranger die.
7
all this has been made by mothers into song.
8
we were arriving by the hundreds and so did not look
like people any longer. the elderly, the young, men, women, camphors,
wires, rain—all questions. it was the sea
that swam through me. I heard my own cries
coming out of another's mouth.
9
forty years later on the shenzhen side a man
carves a passage in the lobby
of a luxury hotel and travels back
forty years through it. he was carrying me
on his back before he fell. his hand
accusing the earth strangling
the bullet air.
10
what we knew of the new world?
barbed fence twenty kilometres long, earth-burn,
salt-lick. prying my mother's hands
hardened around a willow branch. white-eyed watchdogs
carving their lethal arc in the spine. one tests
the fit of death upon him, putting it on like fire
puts on smoke. we ran
taking what we knew with us.
11
the singing of our bodies to keep the land alive.
the singing of our bodies to keep the land alive.
Copyright Credit: Xiao Yue Shan, "exodus hong kong" from The Telling Be the Antidote. Copyright © 2023 by Xiao Yue Shan. Reprinted by permission of Tupelo Press.
Source: The Telling Be the Antidote (Tupelo Press, 2023)