"In Lieu of Ribs"

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With lines from “A true account of the 1958 Yellow River flood”

Heavy rain. On the last day

of the year, loudspeakers

coughing production quotas

into the dark, we climbed

to midnight with the wounds

in your chest, shucking skin

from skin in licks of devil-

fingered ink. Yellow River

pressing loess into its mouth.

Rungs of the past, clinging in every

which way—the dike ladders slick

with silt, mud-brick villages crouched

under a sky of iron filings.

Movement in service of movement,

the cuff of a snake ripening

orange in your throat, phlegm

thick as persimmon rot.

You told me that the day you left

home, Gansu wind scouring

the plateau, you imagined your eyes

were blinkers, seeing everything

across the land: signal lamps strung from commune

to commune. The cadres and the masses,

a human wall, onslaught. Tin megaphones splitting

the rain. Steel can be smelted

from anything. Risk of overflow.

Painted red along the granary

bled downward in the storm. Clinging

rungs of the past. If granted

yet another miracle, in place

of the first, ruched against the mouth

of the river where coffins rose

back up, refusing burial. Hands to catch

your bones, falling easily into

the next, ration slips, tally marks chalked

on empty storehouse wall. Grain locked

in state silos upriver. The rhythm

of evolution, striking again 

and again, flint against soaked

stone. I am crooning for dry

land and it is raining and raining,

embankments softening, river chewing

through its banks, and I am climbing

the hill and I am blind.

“1958年黄河大水灾纪实. A true account of the 1958 Yellow River flood.” Archive.org, 2024, web.archive.org/web/20200703071205/newpaper.dahe.cn/jrab/html/2009-07/13/content_199329.htm.

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