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In Tianmu’s eastern peaks, twin craters rise, named Heavenly Eyes. Rugged peaks and ridges soar, cross-stitched by ravines. Rocks jut among sparse trees. Wild grasses scatter the hillside where pigs roam.
—my mother’s tale from the Tianmu Mountain Ranch, 1959-1962
I am an outcast, a rightist, forced to toil in the Tianmu Mountain Ranch
under Eyes. Beneath a thatched roof, mud walls separate pig styes from
our room storing bean cakes for swine. I huddle with Nanny and my girl.
Our straw bed lies bare on the hard earth. My one-year-old quivers as pigs
rove and grunt. We inherit no warmth but pig lice. A doorless passage leads me to the styes where each night I release pigs to relieve themselves.
Icy wind whistles, and the pungent air stings. One day, my past leader appears, and his eyes refuse to meet mine. The one who stole my
diary and accused me of being a rightist now rears boars below Heavenly.
As sows multiply to hundreds, demands mount: prepare meals, haul water from the river, clean styes, herd pigs to grasslands. A few villagers are assigned to help, I share my rations—two meals
of wild veg gruel daily, as managers feast on rice and wheat. The villagers pilfer sows’ bean cakes. One sifts pig bran, whispers, Mother’s ill, his eyes plead. I gaze at sturdy pigs and nod, Take it!
Back from a short visit to the village home, Nanny’s bound feet swathed
in white, a mourning color. Her eyes swell. Her husband died
of hunger. A villager found and buried him before she knew.
Where are the Eyes? What is heavenly?
Nanny holds my girl as she scours fields for missed wheat. She grinds it into flour with small circling strides. After a wheat porridge reserved solely for my girl, her eyes sparkle beside pigs in the shadow of Heavenly Eyes.
Xiaoly Li is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Grant (2022) recipient. Her poetry collection, Every Single Bird Rising (FutureCycle Press, April 2023), was a Zone 3 Press Book Award finalist. Her poetry is forthcoming, featured, or anthologized in diode, Salamander, Saranac Review, Spillway, PANK, Chautauqua, Rhino, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for: Best New Poets, twice a Pushcart Prize, three times Best of the Net. She lives in Massachusetts where her photography has been shown and sold in galleries in Boston. Xiaoly received her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and her Master’s in computer science and engineering from Tsinghua University in China. Her website: xiaolyli.art.