Blood of tomatoes flung against
slammed doors, here are the embers of our old fights—
Drawn to fever, orange embers trail me
like Beijing mosquitos, they murmur
their angry first words: father,
father. And the light of each argument flickers
back to the missing father, the waylaid,
mistaken father who thought a child
a matrix of feats and inputs. I was my own blaze
as the breeze made me, not a method or machine,
I was the first fig with my own light.
For you, in your childhood, a red sun
spilled its glare, it was your teacher
as you shivered in its cold stare, it made you
sing and sing about the ugly burning of the world til you knew
nothing else. Some people waste their life
on one song, too old to learn
forgiveness. For you, here is an ember turned lesson
for the unrestrained burn—master it.
Like the fire eater who conquers
her pain by devouring its flames,
tame what would scorch you.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 2.
Lijia Xie (she/her) is a poet, an immigrant, and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford. She was born in Beijing and grew up in the San Francisco Tenderloin neighborhood. She earned a BA and an MS from UC Berkeley, an MD from UC San Francisco, and is an MFA student at Warren Wilson College. Her first collection of poems, Public Airing, received the UC Berkeley Eisner Prize. She has received fellowships from Writing By Writers and SF Writers Grotto Rooted & Written BIPOC Writers Conference. She lives in Oakland, CA with her family.
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