2 poems

by Serrina Zou

Basis Independent Silicon Valley

Shanghai, Singing

Every summer we leave for the home
we lost to the endless diaspora.
We dance against the tea ghosts, wrap ourselves
in red silk and peony petals, our sandals
carving granite poetry into the cobblestone street.
Evenings & Ye Ye waltzes with Nai Nai
to the metronome of heartbeats, the
night markets’ technicolor pulse gleans
& glimmers in symphony. At midnight
the moon trips and shatters on an enchanted lake
watered in gold, the steam from our
jiaozi & baozi rising to meet the funeral moths
& somersaulting dragonflies. I imagine
Mama at sixteen laughing with the cigarette boy
around the corner the way I used to
before the sea swallowed us into immigrant,
salt coating our rifled lips. Always,
a beggar bows to Mama on the fraying burlap
floor of gutted fishbones; Mama throws
him a coin from the tofu stall, her eyes trained
on his smile, a soothsaying homonym
gripping his teeth as if to say tragedy survives;
say 天啊, we are still alive in the blood
of a country that wants whiteness fed in prayer.
In the distance the metropolis heaves our birth
names, its taigu drums struggling to keep the rhythm
of its left behind children. Like a mother
city, Shanghai clucks her native tongue, soothes
our static hair with the north wind.
Yesterday, Nai Nai took me to feed the pond ducks:
a tradition from lineage; her gnarled
fingers tracing the elegy of grass. Behind her,
skyscrapers stuck on steel harmonize echoes
to the industrial hum of staccato engine roars.
This year, Nai Nai forgets the breadcrumbs
on purpose; she asks me to sing her our song:
a lullaby of the sea. Two verses & the
melody sinks in my throat. Nai Nai notices.
Somehow, the ducks do too. In this nostalgia,
we plead for a liminal tragedy. Gently, Nai Nai
leaves a memory of crumbs for all the ducks
that have fled, their feathers gulping the smog.
Every summer we leave for a home less
& less ours. We seal the diaspora in our bodies,
play foreigner to our ancestral familiar.

Imbroglio 

Monsoon season & the tides wallow
in our breathless lungs. I comb
the rice paddies with my thumbprint,
feed the magpies with my fingers.
Grandma doesn’t know about this; she tells
me the stories of maidens &
good girls who fed their sorrows
to the greedy birds, salted
tears down their beaks for a melody
of lovesong. I imagine Grandma’s
face if I fled my secret: how her laugh lines
could rewire a clock, setting the stilted
thermometer aflame. It’s no secret
how unladylike I am. Every rendition
of the wet season coils in my bones; the river
pulse dancing against my birthmark,
arched to deliver disaster like my name.
At the collarbone of the coastline,
corals stuck on granite froth with seafoam
textured like laughter against
sunken craters of abandonment. With seaglass
the raven thicket of ash behind me recedes
into the mouth of warring waves, the weight
unbearable. Call it fantasy but one day
I will saunter this shoreline like a porcelain flower:
delicately emaciated & clinging to life
immemorial, wings soaring to the skyline
& back. I know a lady when I see one.
Grandma forgets, buries this chaos theory.