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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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a space for youth writing on mental health & identity
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![]() Yuxuan, when I was young, there was a cavern in the Sierra Nevada Where my brother was crushed by constellations of burning dynamite. I escaped only to return next spring, to find his body under slabs of snow. Sallowed, his thawed blue fingers still gripping tools
and rope, now stiff I kept working— I was young then, free like all creatures in bloom. Yuxuan, how free were we then, in America? we were born small and swollen and yellow, Monsoons howling hardship in our veins. We wished so much to save, waiting. It devoured us then, the promise: Generation by generation. Yuxuan, you must work until your sockets bleed black until no one can reach and paint rainwater on soft palms. Until marrow empties of minerals, and your spine, phosphorus-starved, ruptures itself brittle. Then, hopefully a tapestry of blond bruises Plum-blistered and frostbite-etched—No longer a holding close. America must know the weight of mountains we fought of our own blood— the fractured flesh of the Sierra Nevada, now a hollow chasm in its belly for metal snakes and silver-swindlers She must bear witness, and she must struggle. If not with what she owes, But what she took. From your uncle, and from my brother. From grandmothers and wives. From both of us. That they sent us into limestone cliffs As they pumped each other full of bullets at Bull Run, at Antietam. That suffering is your inheritance from your father, From America as she ran west across our buried bodies, chasing a god From an America that cannot save— their gratitude and my brother both. Comments are closed.
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May 2023
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