Night in the Boxer Rebellion
Rent from DeepDyve- Night in the Boxer Rebellion
In the crimson room there are sevensweet buns that have risen from dough
spiked green by mugwort juice, and elevenletters from our family in Liverpool.
A sepia diploma from St. Anne's hangs on the wall,an American barricade stands outside the window.
Next to thirty-four strands of hair oiled in lavendertwisted through the wooden brush
with its dragon-coiled handle, sits a Bible, densewith 1,189 chapters and 31,103 verses. [End Page 42]
In the Legation Quarter are 473 civilians,409 soldiers, and 3,000 natives who've been rescued.
In the center is a muzzle-loaded cannonwith an antique stomp, the keeper of the hours. Farther awayunderground the North Cathedral with its four spires:
in its tunnels thirty-three priests, forty-three soldiers,two chests of food, and two hundred land mines.
In our courtyard lie thirteen opium eaterswith nineteen ornate pipes like the beaks
of hummingbirds, their four hundred hellish pelletsconfiscated. They stink of infinity
but in this country there is only one room,in the room only one woman at one desk,
a man on the bed, a gun under his pillow,and a black-bellied wasp
conducting this insistent symphony,singing of no future and no past. [End Page 43]
Wanling Su received a MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was the poetry editor of Meridian and a Poe-Faulkner Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate and The Bitter Oleander Press.
