Incense Ash
By Yi-Jung Chen
Three sandalwood sticks burn down in the brass tripod,
their grey ash curving like the spines of sleeping dragons.
Grandmother does not pray for longevity.
She asks the Goddess of Mercy to shorten the road,
to make the dark soil soft enough for her worn knees.
The smoke rises in thin, pale spirals,
writing invisible characters against the blackened wall—
words that dissolve before the ancestors can read them.
When the light flickers out,
she sweeps the fallen dust into her palm,
warm as living breath, soft as forgotten names.
The Salt Harvester’s Song
On the flat evaporative pans of Beimen,
salt is not gathered; it is distilled from silence.
The sun bakes the brine into blinding, geometric crusts.
My mother sweeps the white crystals into small pyramids,
her wooden scraper making a sound like dry bones brushing.
‘Every grain,’ she tells me, wringing the sweat from her towel,
‘is a drop of the sea that refused to drown.’
At dusk, the pink reflections swallow the tide.
She carries the sea home in her wicker baskets,
leaving only the white geometry of her spine behind.
