一日三秋: one day, three autumns - Madeline Chu (UHS Winner)
crinkled as Carpathian walnut trees,
her knuckles press into the freckled
persimmon skins—& i memorize every
curvature of the couloir cnidarian veins, outstretched like scintillating mung beans
with their ebbing jujube flesh. her deft ministrations
envelope the bǎi yè jié into Venetian knots, spilling across inkwells of a hunched
silhouette—& my childlike mouth craters into
caterwauls of hunger. mechanizing my
starvation into chrysanthemums against alabaster
vertebrae, assembled into stacks of paperwork
and meandering checkbooks—because that is
all i will ever become: the yellowing nectarines,
perspiration dripping in rivulets across my forehead
like bourbon on fresh whetting stones, summertime
whittling into shriveled ginkgo and the mandarin
language deadened upon
my tongue. & tonight,
my quivering feet pester the linoleum
floorboards, phalanges pressed against their
frigidity and Damascus steel handles
just as she lectured me.
the kitchen is full of knives,
writhing against the alabaster of my wrists,
ripened as supermarket apricots & their
surrendering of disfigured syrup,
drooping low and withering in perpendicular lines
until their tendons cease to obey
gritting against the protesting bone—its penitentiary
menageries of our newfound motherland
wrinkled palms cradling tentative fruit,
fingertips atop the vermillion shopping cart handle:
the temptations i mistook as gilded yuan,
mischaracterizing the starvation as salvation.
pópo, i protest with hoarseness, an ignoble
reawakening, the household remains shrouded in
hyperborean smokescreens and casket rawness:
her back towards me, furrowed lips
materializing the same phrases they once did,
the lexicons expunged from my arteries until my
amputated tongue utters garbled sounds, saturated with
American rhododendron
tar amalgamating with coppery sweetness
in my mouth—
her diaphanous touch reassuring me that with
the chopsticks in our hands,
this blood will be the only heritage spilled.
*一日三秋 (one day, three autumns) = a Chinese idiom expressing a sense of extended longing, intense anticipation, loss, and painful separation, indicating the simultaneous slowness and change of autumn
*bǎi yè jié = a traditional Chinese dish consisting of braised tofu skins tied into knots
*pópo = grandmother