The Golden Lotus
My girlfriend’s granny had the feet that came
in the film strip after the dowager
empress, before Chiang Kai-shek. To see them,
we would peel her knob-knuckled fingers back
from the felt blanket’s stringy satin hem
while she stared out walleyed through the bedrails.
Alone with her, we watched her watching us
afternoons when her daughter went to shop
for the corms and roots the family ate –
which were as knotted as the foot, its toes
a zig-zag down the instep. All her life
she had walked on the wrong side of her bones
so girls couldn’t run away, my friend said.
And then she’d imitate the tiny steps.
Urged to touch it, I would not, and by June
we drifted, though we assumed twin comas,
making ourselves as dark as nightshade stalks
in neighbouring chairs at the public pool.
Where one day she whispered me up a boy
who’d folded her over the staircase rail
when no one was home except for her gran,
who must have heard the bones being levered
into their new shapes. So close I saw her
right there with them, attending them, mumbling
her inconsolable Chinese. And I watched
the old empire rise underneath her shades
when the girl sneered, It was nothing! – as if
she’d been affronted by the lack of pain.
Page(s) 72-73
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