"Against This Earth, We Knock" by JinJin Xu
Prayer hands to forehead, slide down brow, throat, chest.
You are a pilgrim, a metaphor, more than belonging, a bucket by the well.
Departure dips your border into another.
Slice the middle of you, the bell hollows.
Spread open those hands.
Crawl forward.
Crawl through the known world, the scriptures are watering.
Pilgrim as pitiless blue, without motion, only motion.
Prostrate body towards heaven.
One hundred thousand kowtows towards the holy.
Head cites this earth.
Again, this earth, this earth.
Rise joint by joint. Spine, fingertip, toe. Empty the rungs of your lungs.
From those who die along the way, pluck a singular tooth.
Tuck its owner inside your breast.
Place one foot before the other, what’s below will hold.
Sift past lives through a sieve, careful where the wind carries.
Tumble of organs, whose house of grief?
Reach past the veil. The spirits cannot hear you.
Open palms, carve dirt from your nails, unspeakable sour.
Hour of the rooster, what belongs there.
Break water from fruit, unravel silk from worms, mouths worn with desire.
Forehead knocking this earth.
This earth refuses. A formality of the maker.
Air thins in the plains. Place the native red flower on your tongue.
No longer are you walking.
Prostrate body. Lungs kiss what is below. You wait.
A small life flattens between your palms.
You bleed, two red brides.
Incense stains the morning purple.
Fistful of lemons.
You have carried the dead, their tooth.
The air thins to song.
You are waiting to arrive.
At the gate, you hammer.
Into wood flesh, you hammer the teeth of pilgrims.
Unwrap sheets from your body.
This earth, knocking.
JinJin Xu is a filmmaker and writer from Shanghai. Her work has appeared in The Common, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, and has been recognized by prizes from the Poetry Society of America, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Press, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. She is currently an MFA candidate at NYU, where she is a Lillian Vernon Fellow and teaches hybrid workshops. Her debut, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, won the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming November 2020.
