Letter From My Heredity by Patrick Tong
You know, I know your dreams have all been about blood–
how death always seems to outrace the morning, the cruelest
of economies. Where the fire wakes before the sunrise, the
suffocation finds you before your brother. Nobody remembers
when I crawled out of the womb, if I was ever part of one.
I will say this. A motherless thing doesn’t always limp into
evil. Here’s how the rumor began, bitter and godless like
a hunger. A hypothesis you scorched into yourself. I know,
I left your great-grandfather to crooks when war lassoed
the village. War, like a daughter’s catharsis interrupted by
a blade. War, like troops dragging through the dead of night.
I know, I raised your grandmother against a country’s
own dislocation, history thinning like her shoulder blade, like
a locust-gnawed thatch. How the town’s fields unfastened
into burning, which is to say famine knew her better than
the doctors ever will. I know, I almost taught your father
how to martyr. Yet almost may not absolve the sky gaping
open into a mausoleum, the soldiers inmating every testimony
into silence. I know, this is a believing little more than a
begging, a synonym for all the wrong words limping through
your throat. Still, the only difference between sin and kin
is a consonant of love, a plea for forgiveness graying by
the hour. What it means to rejoice, I answer with my hands.
Think not of a wound, but of our flesh healing together
as a prayer. Think of perfect daybreak and mythology, the
goddess weaving light through the horizon. Every Lunar
Festival, we sluice shellacked bowls in the sink and spin
mahjong tiles like silk. Tonight the moon waxes into our
lineage, glazed and traceable as the tangyuan cusping your
mouth each year. For all your knowing, you spool back
our language and relearn memory in its greatest metaphor–
the way your arm and palm raise to the sky like our flag.
