藕断丝连¹:
O love,
What do you know
about sacrifice,
When your skin
is lighter than the sky?
What do you know
about holding a rabbit
And shooting it
between the eyes?
Of culling an accent and
skinning it to its core?
After the war, my grandfather still
dreams of the mountains from his childhood,
The red cormorant soaring with an
olive branch within its beak.
In every story,
someone berates Chang Er
For drinking the potion
and ascending to the moon.
But the last time someone
shortened her name to Chang,
She thought about the moon—how it made
even half an existence look beautiful.
Somewhere in the past, someone said
唱首儿歌² and thought of her.
Why is it
when we die,
We always remember most
the song from our childhood?
O love,
Tell me how much it hurts
To be the boy with a bone in your throat
then multiply it by an existence.
In the 70s, we slow danced with
feather boas and washed-out cheong sams.
In the 80s, they announced they were closing
the Getai, cleaning up the streets.
We were always walking
backwards into an ending.
All around us,
the mountains,
Their aching.
Their haunting, damning
mountain sound.
¹ ǒu duàn sī lián: Even when the lotus root breaks, the fibres still remain
² Chàng shǒu ér gē: Sing a children’s song
Everything Is About Dying Except Death Itself
How does blood look like on sand?
Like lips parted in an O.
Like the siren of allied forces that never arrived.
My grandfather says,
天不怕地不怕，天塌下来顶住它
Because he has seen both thunder
and rain, and wishes either
had swallowed him whole.
Because once, I asked him whether
he fears God or man, and he said
he fears only the man without God
At the mouth of a gun, my grandfather
walked through every ending but never saw
one in which he could come out the same
Dying never happens the way
it does in the movies:
The sluice of breath, shallow
ebb of heart, last words suspended
On the thread of another
ending but happens in two ways:
First, quick. The bullet squaring flesh
off the chest. Petulant flower. Eyes wide o-
pen like the Ah! in 花儿
Second, slow. The wearing of bones,
the night that gasps like a wrung-out
arrowtail into the day,
The white curve of its spine,
bent with weight, slipping
into the harvest moon.
Every night since he returned
from the beach, just barely alive,
my grandfather remembers the rush
Of the ocean and turns up
the shower to forget its voice.
He recites the name of every comrade
Then lays out his blanket in the tub,
falls asleep, Glock-19 in hand,
feet towards the door,
As the ghost with a senbou
watches him from the corridor,
waiting till he comes out
The other side.
Sher Ting is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a Kenyon Review Winter Workshop ‘23 participant, 2021 Writeability Fellow with Writers Victoria and a 2021/2022 Pushcart and Best of The Net nominee with work published/forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Colorado Review, OSU The Journal, The Pinch, Salamander, Rust+Moth and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Bodies of Separation, is published with Cathexis Northwest Press and second chapbook, The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, is forthcoming with CLASH! Books. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.carrd.co
Photo by Francesco Ungaro