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Necessary Ingredients #1 by Sinejan Kılıç Buchina

Letter From My Heredity by Patrick Tong

*Homage to Chinese citizens of the Second-Sino Japanese War (1937-1945), the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), and the Tiananmen Square Massacre (1989)

​

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.


Patrick Tong is a high school senior from the northern suburbs of Chicago. A “Best of Issue” winner for the National Poetry Quarterly, he has also been recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and the Poetry Society of the United Kingdom. His work appears or is forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, After the Pause, and The Rising Phoenix Review, among others.

Sinejan Kılıç Buchina is a NY based artist and visual instructor. She is of Circassian-Abkhazian ancestry, born in Turkey. She received her B.F.A. in Art in Istanbul, and continued her education with programs in London and Berlin, and completed her MA in New York. Buchina has exhibited in galleries and institutions throughout New York, London and Istanbul, and is currently working on evolving projects in New York, Sukhum and Istanbul.
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