for my great grandmother

1937, 福州.

a mango splits
between four sticky hands,
quartered into cubes and aurora skin flayed,
listen with knees pressed to rounded elbow,
heart tremors against your sun bruised neck,
for the arrival of ship clad strangers
greedy to sow a red-crowned nation,
static swollen splintered from inside.

you plant 木瓜 pits,
back craned in summer heat,
one hundred fourteen 福州 degrees,
white crescents prostrate under a tempest
of nuclear flares across a seething pepper sky
witness womb combustion, fruit bursting head first
and raw from an umbilical embrace,
return to shallow coffins graved into earth.

under white stained tents
farmers nurse gunpowder blooms
it is 西瓜 season,
green rinds guard yellow flesh,
your mother’s flower pin glints in sesame malt
count seventeen seeds, read them as bullets shot -
ripped under your teeth, muzzled by the contours of a foreign flag,
relearn to consume what has already rotted from within.