the coming of spring in the time of martial…

I could tell you this: marigolds are a night flower.

in the hour of my birth there were men in the streets,

some with knives and some between skin and some

peeling open buds with swollen hands trying to find

a home to hide in. my mother fingered a ripened

bowl of hot water, carving out upon its surface the lines

by which our family would occur. five tracks wavering

before being soothed to nothing. papa came in with

the hands of smoke around his mouth. a fingernail

pressed into the back of my neck. quiet now. children

rose like night-fires amidst decades in which no one spoke

above a whisper, striking the petrified days with heads

black as matches. among the dead: old hua, teacher

jian, chien-sha from the building two doors down,

cheng-yi who said the food on the mainland was better,

aunt ren and her pockets full of small oranges, young

ko and her sweet daughter who had lost teeth the day

prior. each night we soothed time as if it were newborn,

as a song about marigolds prayed through the radio

and we held death upon fingertips to count by. in those years

it was children like I that cut through our mothers spearing,

darkened already in this world by the one we are fated

to return to. worn patches in the cloth of the nation.

salt of blood in the mouth immortal as anthem. stay still,

just like you're dead. we whispered to hear ourselves speak.

Source: The Telling Be the Antidote (Tupelo Press, 2023)