Crepuscular, a portrait of matrilineal scoliosis
By Ariel Wu
grandmother, who is from the north & has scoliosis, totters from the car like
a bad tooth, the black, acidic sugar of dusk eating into her spine. in
the bone-damp lampshade, her body swells like the skeleton of chinese
lanterns in spring, bulging with pus-colored light. mama helps her out of the car, her
hand on the crutch reverent like an empty ambulance. against the sunset,
i strive & fail at tracing the straight lines in her shadows, a well-weeded
garden. couldn’t you be more enthusiastic? father asks. grandmother says
she feels neglected. in the crescent of our chinese bones, sympathy melts
into bullets, dripping from our surfaces in heartfuls of ash. at night
i dream of her figurine tucked into an embroidered shoe box, the
stream of her flesh out flapped and brimming like butter. the chinese
daughter i am, obsessed with steam irons & corks & labyrinths: how
comely & beautiful it would be to straighten & disentangle a time-arched
body. for dinner, grandmother nai makes pork dumplings with
chinese chives, her hands snow-choked & soil-veined like grandfather’s
tombstone in her birthplace, dough rising from the crevices of her
hand like hemlock. the cuffs of the dumplings like rags. at dinnertime i hide
in my room and tell mama the chives smell like dead rabbits and mama
says she agrees. grandmother calls her a shen jing bing. good & chinese, grandmother
lets poison flow in ivory rivulets in her body but sees everything as omens:
my refusal to eat chives, shrapnel of the broken plate mama scraped her
palms on, mama’s confessions to her faceless, bloodless heathen god. the day
she and father fought mama for the fish bones mama forgot to dump in
the trash, i stand behind my door, hearing grandmother’s wails billowing through
her enclosed, sea-sealed body like a window, the glass unraveling her curvature
like the gliding doors at the hilton. on the way to the airport, the car lights of father’s
benz, deer-eyed and bloodshot under a fracturing sun, nai nai
tells me to hold home on the tip of my tongue & that gratitude is a prayer to
our ancestors. in our household, scoliosis is matrilineal, a legacy of arrow-backed
heathens, the summer moon clipped between our knees. father’s benz
About the Writer...
Ariel Wu (she/her) is a high school senior from Shanghai, China. Her poems have been recognized by Chinchilla Lit, Nowhere Girl Collective, and PVLSE. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers Studio and Juniper Young Writers. When she is not writing about the quandaries of girlhood and over-analyzing literature, she can be found at various K-pop concerts. Check out her published work on Instagram at @ariel_by_sylvia_plath.