In the mornings, my grandmother is a tired shadow hunched against the pane of 
her bedroom window, brittle body eclipsed by the waking sun. She cups my cheeks, smooth as jade, 

in her weathered palms--lined like the mud-slabbed banks of the Yangtze, where a thousand 
bloody footsteps linger--and searches for warmth in my soft face, so similar to her brother’s,
 
whose only trace of existence is a dusty photograph in the attic, where all the junk lies.
I’ve memorized the kerosene in her eyes, twin flames reeking of ashes and formaldehyde,
 
the burnt fragments of a family fractured, a village plundered, a country fallen.
After bed, my grandmother rubs the silk fibers of her flowing cerulean dress,
 
the same dress she wore on lazy summer afternoons roaming barefoot with her brother
over warm yellow grass. It’s become a daily ritual: my grandmother sitting in the rocking chair on the sunporch
 
when the air is swollen with silence, her tiny frame silhouetted by the first orange light of dawn,
the world holding its breath like the pause before thunder. I imagine her now –
 
bringing her weary fingers over the fabric that billows like an ocean in her lap, her hands reaching for
the distant memory of her brother’s laughter, rushing over river rocks like birdsong,
 
the now foreign sound.