I bottle kerosene at a factory, sticking
labels with the firm hands you gave me.
Dad had firm hands before he drank.
He’d wake us up. A staggering shadow.
I woke up and left on Rice Planting Day
when mom cried into a bowl of congee.
When I make congee, I cry to myself.
It’s better when cooled, and served with pickles.
Pickles are cheap like a printed calendar:
the gods, festivals, mandarin Chinese.
Chinese is a weakling in a mega-city.
The future is English, a tall white master.
At school, I was bright, tall, and pale.
I studied stolen novels under the dark.
Dark is the color of small-town China.
I bottle kerosene; I light up your sky.
Weijia Pan is the author of Motherlands, selected by Louise Glück for the 2023 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. A poet and translator from Shanghai, China, his poems have appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he was a winner of the Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. He is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University
