Hong kong amnesiac

Anne Kwok

                                 During the Great Chinese Famine of 1960,
                                 everything became food.

Already the birds
have forgotten danger

                  & peck the black tongues
                  of stone lions. All this city’s

forgetting & quick letting
Of blood. Of no good

                  mothers. O skyscraper,
                  o centuried menace, if I claw

my way to your roof I
may see a colony of bodies

                  grinning under the weight
                  of wet markets & sickness–

Say it hangs like a pig’s axed
corpse spinning slow

                  & faceless. Say it spun
                  in the years when neighbors

swapped their children
to use as food. Peeled bark

                  from boughs, for garnish.
                  I imagine the parents

could not bear to kill
their sons. Each night,

                  a mother bringing home
                  a strange child to butcher.

O city, o amnesiac–
unhook your spine

                  from its tender forgetting.
                  I want to wash out

the redness from your
tiled floors. Come dusk,

                  the rivers muscle through
                  our houses. We bathe

only to find ourselves
mouth-deep in meat water

                  & blood slick. In the end,
                  the city & everything in it

steaming. Half-lives
hurricaned to the hour,

                  birds shitting all around us.

Anne Kwok is a National Student Poet Semifinalist and a two-time Foyle Young Poet of the Year. She has been honored by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, Poetry Society of UK, National Poetry Quarterly, Smith College, Sine Theta, and the Apprentice Writer, among others. Her work is published or forthcoming in Hyphen Magazine, Oberon Poetry, Eunoia Review, and Half Mystic.