Judith Rawnsley
Touching Base
The day they eat the dog, Mama begs Chi:
Swim! Take your girlfriend. Time has run out.
Ten miles a day in the Pearl River roping
muscles, honing hopes, until the October
storm-clouded night they bind
themselves together and drop
into the mouth of Mirs Bay. Ahead
figures already swimming, swallowed
by cold, against the current, still afloat.
Death circles in the darkness. Waves snarl
like patrol dogs. Bullets bite. Fog obscures
those already starved, shot or drowned,
washed up on Shenzhen beaches,
TB-ridden, limbs bitten off by sharks.
With each stroke, Sea-Wing counts
the things they’re leaving—
elderly parents, siblings, college educations.
She chokes, feels a jerk on the rope—
three years’ pig farming, dead cousins,
public beatings, an official’s hand up her skirt.
Chi ploughs on towards a rich man’s floor to sweep,
a factory job, a document that says he belongs, pushes
past a bloated corpse, buoyed by the warmth
of Sea-Wing’s lantern heart.
They wake on a littered beach to see English
letters on a rusted Carnation can.
The frayed rope has become a wedding band;
Typhoon Dot their witness, the waves their guests.