Her Lost Village

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.