baba says huanghuali should always sit in the sector for family. yang wood sweats sun rays every morning and bleeds light into mooncake molds, scabs over rosecarving that was once a harbinger of every colonization but ours, an airstrike of disaster. feng and shui qilin-halved. raid horns shock-signal a village in pulau pinang. in hokkien the first syllable of penang is bi. call it shelter, call it a mother, roof waterlogged and sagging. call it a vessel for survival: a noah’s ark punitive to the very act it was made for. i track the shrapnel’s road map across all eight sectors of a windwatered room—money, fame, love crumbed to hawthorn dust and
blood-bleached. i want to be basted in fire. i want to play weiqi on a tin bucket, to slice a village into sunlight instead of birthing yellowface and blueblood, to hang my chest on the hook of an altar, palms wet with milky dawn. to unbutton my eyes at yin shi and sit the month alone. feng cracks the sky open as soon as the british come; washes gentle hands into eggshells, thirteen by thirteen. the moon sirening for oxygen
limpet desperate. it is no mistake that dui means both child and completion, that to lift a fetus from between the legs is to sand down the corners of a life until mothed and mothered to flypaper. then perhaps it is also no mistake that on every feng shui map i have read, dui is white. that song-ayi wears robes rimmed in frost as she mourns the loss of a uranium lung, a baby burst from the rib. five years ago she drank anemic seasalt from her wife’s neck and today the only sector left is dui, and god said let there be light but never knew that too much of it makes a funeral procession. when the british arrive
the whole village is caked in white ash; the snow most of us have never seen, footprints burnished by stampeding buffalos, wooden and weary
but needing to run, refugees of a silent genocide. all of us carrying our own white maps of
surrender, rearranging our lives to grieve them smaller
and smaller.
blood-bleached. i want to be basted in fire. i want to play weiqi on a tin bucket, to slice a village into sunlight instead of birthing yellowface and blueblood, to hang my chest on the hook of an altar, palms wet with milky dawn. to unbutton my eyes at yin shi and sit the month alone. feng cracks the sky open as soon as the british come; washes gentle hands into eggshells, thirteen by thirteen. the moon sirening for oxygen
limpet desperate. it is no mistake that dui means both child and completion, that to lift a fetus from between the legs is to sand down the corners of a life until mothed and mothered to flypaper. then perhaps it is also no mistake that on every feng shui map i have read, dui is white. that song-ayi wears robes rimmed in frost as she mourns the loss of a uranium lung, a baby burst from the rib. five years ago she drank anemic seasalt from her wife’s neck and today the only sector left is dui, and god said let there be light but never knew that too much of it makes a funeral procession. when the british arrive
the whole village is caked in white ash; the snow most of us have never seen, footprints burnished by stampeding buffalos, wooden and weary
but needing to run, refugees of a silent genocide. all of us carrying our own white maps of
surrender, rearranging our lives to grieve them smaller
and smaller.
Sophie Choong (she/they) is a fifteen-year-old student in Vancouver, Canada. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Margins (AAWW), the Unbroken Journal, the League of Canadian Poets, Angel Rust Magazine, Paracosm Literary, and elsewhere. In their free time, they enjoy playing video games, drinking green tea, and watching Ghibli movies.