Dynasties By Allison Wu

The Rising Phoenix Review

June 9

Dynasties

i. Hubei, 1960

it is harvest once more
and the rice paddies clog with blooming
clangs of rifles, grain moored fields reaped
crimson. gunsmoke shawls death tarred homes,
beds ribboned in abandonment. a girl tiptoes
between bodies blued to battlefields and learns that to love
this country is to relinquish: the calderas of hunger hollowing
her five siblings' cheeks, how her mother clutches
the paraffin-skinned infant against her bone
dry chest. she gives them the last of her aphid infused rice
but slowly, they deflate, preserved
in leathered shells. she understands this is a season
of subtraction, sacrifice slipping through her skeleton fingers.

ii. Beijing, 1989

she knows she is nothing revolutionary
just a daughter of war. sewage of reddening
light spews from the medallioned sun, bodies flayed
in bullet holes strewn across avenues as they spill
from the square. violence satin in the heat, stitched
into the skyline along with the cacophonies of protests
and fists carving the air like whiplash. a man makes his final stand
before her front door, his last words a beg for asylum. she watches
fatality thicken in the air as metal slips clean through the gap
between his rib bones, everything around her festering
with collapse. she knows every murder will be wiped
from timelines like the stain of corpses from these streets,
and so she imagines that the organs streaming from the man's
ruptured body are swaddled in ichor,
clotting golden in the dying light.

iii. New York, 2022

skyscrapers splinter the horizon, the air heady
and sleepless. incense of street food grease rising
above the harbor. i imagine what she sees as
she looks at my face, a product of a cleaved
ocean, some form of her own juxtaposed
in an alien world of all this fullness.
i collect stories of the departures
she wields like legacies and emulsify her visions
of slaughter into my marrow. as we bask in displacement,
the neon cosmos of billboards engulfing us grows
dim and i silently promise her that remembrance
is my duty, our fingers interwoven: past clinging
to present in the burgeoning night.

By Allison Wu

Allison Wu is a high school student from upstate New York. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers and Hollins University and can be found or is forthcoming in Eunoia Review, The Lunar Journal and londemere lit.