It’s springtime. It’s the first anniversary of the pandemic. I’m remembering before, imagining what’s to come. I’m sifting through letters and photographs from the past to better be in the mind of all that is life-giving and ancient and novel.

April 2006

Dear jonah,

Everything is before bloom, whispering become and at once immeasurably full. Mornings are bird-sung soliloquies echoing ancient Chinese men wading through wildflowers and rice, relics framed in yellow sky. They plot land and row boats while children ride to school in wheelbarrows, rubbing the night away from their eyes, sheltered under piles of sewing machines and tattered textiles and wood and other towering supplies. Ma mas and ba bas, red coat clad and weathered rough under brown hats, march onward with grave and singular purpose, a secret mission, a survival. A survival of the millions who for pennies labor over the clothes on our backs. This is the textile capital of China, this is the future, this is last week’s black and white photograph—a seam connecting continents, collars to cries. Laments as sonorous and content as an erhu song, alive with the the zig-zag fervor of bicycling teenagers, three and four of them clustered on tiny green seats, legs dangling in black exhaust, arms wrapped around the world. Circles and circles and circles. Fathers speed on mopeds like bright, drunken dragonflies with babies in tow who are helmetless and flailing and flouting gravity. They’re clipping through the masses and the laboring, the tatter rag supply and demand, the women from another time who sew stories eons old into the twenty-first century. Green forevers and magenta buds and the smell of rain that never comes. Dream songs sounding the new of dawn, wrapped in the wind, supine, and bending toward our moon.

~amanda