In Los Angeles, skeletons burn in the deprecating
amber glow. This is no different:

the kerosene leaks from our silhouettes
like repentance. 糖葫芦¹

corrodes my gummed-up mouth. Mother reaches
into me; she extricates this cottoned want,

shoehorned between my canines. I take a screenshot
of the carmine hills. Her epidermis

peels in watered-down contempt. Our family
ticks counterclockwise — from Beijing

to San Francisco, then Beijing. Evolution is a myth
in the countryside. My cousins are all gap-toothed

and play like skeletons in the rain.
I lean into Mother. When she flinches,

the shirt assumes a woolen grin around her bowed
shoulders; I abstain from saying what I cannot

read in that lulling, ink-spiked tongue. 中文²。
Father offers to romanticize the jewel-laden boroughs

of Beijing, but I refuse — I want more than heartache.
On the runway, Mother dignifies us;

I board the humming plane
to ignore another wildfire in California.

¹糖葫芦 — tanghulu
²中文 — Mandarin

   for Mama

Between the piss-slick walls of your city, your canines
bridged the diaspora of Uyghurs. You learned

Mandarin & flossed the country-girl
accent from your teeth. The light only pinned

the clotheslines to your heat-freckled arms. Static
gutted you. You met a boy & ran

your hands through his cotton-fields of hair.
He taught you to ignore the religion of trash-bins

that had opened like envelopes: rampant
prayers. The countryside wet

itself in the night. You watched sallow farmers behead
ruby-throated birds that upstaged the open-air market

in an act of rebellion. Grandma confined you
to the disintegrating house. You dressed the river

with plastic. The boy called
& told you that your father had died.