mother - a collection of poems

By: Collin Wang

Trigger warning: death, suicide, violence, and rape.

The Nanjing Massacre was a six-week tragedy during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1938) in which large numbers of Chinese civilians were killed, raped, and subjected to atrocities.

hopscotch

i.

the children play hopscotch

one, two, 

three

bare feet

trying to avoid

the unknown 

of the aftermath:

a neighbor, still

in her pale white 

dress, tied, knotted,

a frayed rope,

limp legs dancing a waltz,

before 

a stack of diaries, 

a lone photograph,

a home

lit up like a candle. 

ii.

he asks his Ma why

the green men want to paint 

the houses black?

he regrets not 

asking more questions

later, they will wrestle 

him from her grip,

and he can’t dance away 

like the neighbor did.

iii.

her blackened feet

pierced by

ivory ashes

and the littered cracked streets,

adding dark stains

to the dark stains,

she dusts herself into a soldier

& crawls into soldier shells

& chars herself a red darker

than this memory, still

iv. 

after she would show 

up where the

numbered squares would have been

she altars the remnants 

of yesterday, 

carrying the stumps

of those who wanted 

to be buried

and marked

and surrounded by wood

she chants 

in silence:

one, two,

three.

faith

is when you wake up, drenched in sweat from a nightmare, because you heard Ma, voice dissolving between stretches of thunder, whispering that the rain outside was God's tears, and you feel them flow down your face too, spilling onto the silk-like carpet, the liquid mixing with the shadows of what is under your bed, so you pull yourself out, into the rain, so your body can understand the water better, the pitter-pattering of feet, the pulsing of the ripples about to burst, and the rain that soaks your hair feels like a second baptism. now, you’re the one who is drowning but you don’t realize how much you are holding on, if you understood, you would tuck yourself back inside, continue the game of hide and seek, and only sometimes ask: who's there? but you had to believe in Ma's stories of goats escaping from their cages, children being given to the sky, then lining up against confession booths with a handbook nailed to their chest, listen. her voice is coming back in uneven fragments, nothing else. so you pray to remember her face again or at least the shape of her hand around yours.

forgive me, Father

forgive me, Father 

I only learned

to walk last summer

into the always-open laundromat

across from the graveyard

a soda machine breathes in the corner

someone’s sheets whirl

a slow white storm behind a globe 

of glass. the owner's voice catches 

on chilly air, the bruises on her shoulders  

still blooming from

carrying her mother onto 

the flower-choked bed.

she says she wants to carry 

my mother too

the men refused

too weak

too emotional 

too heavy 

they said

heavy 

heavy like grief

heavy like sin

heavy like the way

I had to blow out the church candles. 

she says the word slept  

instead of passed 

as if something about the way 

the mouths are open

gives an illusion of words 

trying to spill out

breaths trying to be torn 

away. she thinks

she can be forgiven too

if she carried them all

but no one is left to listen

to her confession. 

how sad: all she wants is to 

hurt for someone and never 

have to see them again. 

12.5.2025