Heather Qin

The Other Side

When a man dies in Shanghai, it is never natural.
Although here, today he might be a body-shaped cocoon
leaking cherry kool-aid. Tomorrow, he might be 

another headline bleeding across the paper. The first day
after we land in Shanghai, Grandpa returns
from the street vendor and mourns the man 

with me. I take our breakfast back to his condo
and we watch it grow cold. Decades before
it was grandpa’s father and another man

they mourned. No street vendors, no
high-rise buildings and no country he could call
his own. When he wondered how to kill

a country, everyone said shoot it invade
it run it through with a sword but no one said
cut it into little pieces, so each slice becomes

a new fault line to tourniquet. The sky still
clear as a bell. His grandson will soon disappear
into America, along the Atlantic coast, the first

to cross an ocean. I wish the distance
between us wasn’t generations, so I would
never need to speak in apology. When I was

younger, loving a country
meant never leaving it. To love and forgive
each time they ask aren’t they committing genocide 

over there and remember they bit into the country
first, bit into it like a rind, a snake stealing
another’s eggs, as dead men littered the street.

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Heather Qin (she/her) is a student from New Jersey. She is an alumnus of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Besides writing, Heather loves classical music and reading.