Her Lost Village
Words By Maggie Yang, Art By upklyak
The following piece is the poetry winner of F(r)iction’s Fall 2021 literary contest
splinters her weathered skin,
plums rotting under the sun. Colors
on her skin fissure into roots,
sweetness, dormant in her veins eroding into dirt.
Gabled roofs wrangle her hands as
they become limp, harvested into
withered seeds and chipped in the wind.
Chopsticks and brushstroke fracture, fashioning
into lifelines sprawled like limbs, crooked paths;
the cobblestones fork into diverging omens, slashed
with concrete roads and creases in her palm. The Yangtze River spills into roots, flooding
porcelain bowls, suffocating the plums— sour yet sweet, buried
like proverbs in the dirt.