Youth laureates share their ‘Poetry of the Pandemic’

(noun.) a story circulated among a people by word of mouth,

sometimes passed down from parents to their children,

often considered to be false or based in superstition.

in every version of this story,

my people have a poor memory.

i. CORRECTION

my people trade memories like tongues,

worthless until cut out. better the tongue

than the teeth, or the throat, or our stomachs.

i have never seen my grandmother’s tongue,

but every night her teeth float in a little cup

on the sink, pretending to be bone.

before 1899, millions of oracle bones

were ground into dust and swallowed

as medicine. then we learned of how

they once told the future, and so

we stopped eating our ghosts.

ii. MODERN DAY RETELLING

my chinese teacher keeps asking me if i remember.

if i remember this word that means history or poem,

the hour or a room. careful how you hold your tongue,

or time collapses into just the space between four walls,

or you hear a poem once and it becomes your ancestor.

the moral of this story: my grandmother’s teeth

will survive her, but tongues are less bloodless.

example: a white man with a phd in asian studies

keeps asking me where i’m from so he can tell me the name

of every chinese city he’s ever been to. these men

always have perfect memories, and so he says:

once i spent three weeks in shanghai. twice,

i spent two days in wuhan. i bet i’ve been

to more chinese cities than you have, girl

with a chinese name, a chinese face.

but these are not the only things i’ve inherited

from my people: my people have a poor memory.

my dad, who likes to start all his stories with

i remember, who never knew how to remember

without lying –– his favorite story is the one

where he meets my mother for the first time: in wuhan,

when they were five. in shanghai. beijing. wuhan again,

but this time they were seven and it was still summer.

iii. THE TRUTH

chang jiang meets the eastern sea just outside

my mother’s childhood home in shanghai,

and in the west it floods xishui every summer,

the dirt floor of yeye’s old house growing damp

beneath my dad’s feet, the ground soft enough

to hold the memory of his body for just a minute.

the truth is my dad learned to swim by not drowning,

and this is how he really met my mother,

and what is memory but a second chance?

some branches of my family tree end in nothing.

and you may have a perfect memory

but chang jiang means long river

and water never forgets anything it touches.

in one version of this story,

i am born without a tongue.

in another,

my mom gives it away for a pound of white rice and a green card.

in another, you bleach my tongue, then ask me to make your language

beautiful. and so i cut it out myself. ask me again, where i’m from.

i’ll tell you i’m a shapeshifter. poet-liar. truth-teller story-teller.

myth-weaving legend-breathing living folk tale.

& what is a folk tale but an oracle bone that survived fire

by splitting itself in the shape of the future?

& what is a poet but the last witness to the fire?