Beguile by Heather Qin (15, New Jersey)

Your name is very pretty.

Mama, what does it mean?
Beauty. You are lucky to be born so beautiful.

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You’re not thinking about the baby 
girls abandoned in plash-stained wicker caskets 

under overcast skies frowning 
on sunless roadsides, orphanage shores

flood like monsoons. There is no recollection
before this. How do you cry for a mother that does not want you?

when the orphanages plump them up
like fat hens barely enough to hide 

glass ribs jutting under ashen skin, eyes aghast
quiver like fishhooks over stillness

waterfalls of Caucasian bodies and courters inspect 
and poke and want to take one home.

Girls: the root of troubles, wellsprings 
of insatiable calamity. Us flighty poplars age 

like yellowed pearls, soon to be wandering 
in discarded red light districts. Again.

Listen— this beauty and its demure flesh
and melted blooms is not for me. 

It’s for husbands and swindlers, the dogmatic 
and the selfish. The girls who came

before were pretty and they were only girls who survived.

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