Poetry by Esther Sun

                  i wen† lef† CC



Spring

              On Uighur internment in Eastern China

In Xinjiang, hands collect unfelled promises 
in government compounds and the wind picks up 
dust and leaves from poplars that give 

and give. The trees open like an orchestra,
and their branches, fluted ribbons, thrash. A man down 
the corridor sews ashes over his body. No one remains 

the same. No one predicts how hunger whittles citizens 
into dancers. No one knows they only spare the dead. 
See: a mother handed her infant son’s corpse. Guards return 

another girl to the cell in the cavity of night, her skin 
stamped black and black and blue. Electricity: the silk 
of muscle and bone, a flowering of fiber optic cable bulging 

at the throat. A forest of tiger chairs earth these paper bodies. 
They are your brothers and sisters. They are mine. The wind 
is picking up speed. Like orchestras, the poplars open.

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Esther Sun is a Chinese-American writer from the Silicon Valley in Northern California and 2020 American Voices Nominee. Her poems have been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and they have appeared in Vagabond City, Euphony Journal, Élan, and Blue Marble Review.

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