Sa Pa
HANNAH HAN
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Our children bathe in river water.
They drink out of soft styrofoam cups and eat half-hatched eggs, a sheen of oil coating their upper lips, slivers of newborn feathers falling from their teeth, embryonic beaks and lips gasping for their mothers’ tongues. We feed our children youth in handfuls-- shards of beef wreathed in green beans, eggs bleeding yolk and scallions, and hand-harvested rice like bits of crushed jade. We squat around an earth-dug stove as thin-ribbed cats thread between our feet, fat, rope-tailed rats drooping from their delicate tongues. We watch our children’s throats shiver, white, hollow as winter sun, and we ache to give them more, as our mother-river, our hands, mouths, stomachs, fill with Coke cans broken like river-worn shells, naked bones of starved cows, and splinters of plastic bowls, still streaked with the greased trails of small fingers. Outside our children steer the oxen down dormant rice fields, their ropy arms, quick sandalled feet, and young bodies learning. They play in the river mud, and taste the humidity on their tongues. They laugh. |
Hannah Han is from Los Angeles, California. She has received recognition for her writing from the National YoungArts Foundation and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, and her work has been published in The Jet Fuel Review and Sine Theta, among others. In her free time, Hannah enjoys drawing, eating churros, stalking Goodreads, and sleeping in.