Poem in Which a Gold Rush Bride Writes to Her Husband

By Joanna Ng

Issue 44 • Fall 2021 • Poetry

1st Place Poetry

2021 Summer Contest

This poem asks of its readers many questions, but among them: What does it mean to be buried away from one’s home? What does it mean to remain a stranger in a strange land even after death? What does it mean to return home only in bones? How do we beg the land to witness our pain, our dying, and our death? Fueled by mournful musicality I returned to this poem over and over.

– Natalie Scenters-Zapico

When Chinese argonauts died in California, their bodies would be buried until the flesh decomposed. The bodies would then be exhumed, the bones cleaned and shipped back to their home village to be buried with the ancestors.

Husband, you haunt the wrong mountain, return

to White Cloud Mountain, where

sparrows

nest in our roof,

tell us when to throw seeds into spring.

Gold Mountain, Gum Saan — Husband,

don’t you hear it? The name

itself a kind of closing.

Saan, meaning mountain,

Saan, meaning shut.

What sky

is there but a bleached sky? What

door but a closed one.

Husband, do you think they want you living or dead?

Haunting gweilo in their hangtowns, their

shanty camps, their double-door saloons, their

mills, their mines, their

graveyards, their

first golden spike in the ground. Country

always breaking something. First,

the mountain, then

your precious body.

And for what? To see what dust

they could make into gold. Bitterfruit

for bitter labor.

Husband, damn the gold — let us suffer together

instead of apart,

let the other Pearl River wives weep,

wait,

grateful for bones, for gold smuggled back

through clavicle

and sternum.

So little to pass on — a bit of lustrous rock, a little

luck, ossified dead seed.

The cooking pot is my only companion, and I love her to death.

Husband, today I made too much rice.

Husband, today I butchered the chicken,

and what I don’t

eat will go bad without you.

Husband, it pains me to see the bird gone in this way, fed

to the ground

until it is picked clean.

Husband, the bonescraper writes to say there is so little left.

Joanna Ng

Joanna Ng is a poet from Fresno, California. She received her BA and MA in English from the University of California, Davis. She is currently an MFA student at the University of Mississippi. She writes poems about the junction of language, labor and place, and the ghosts that live in those spaces. She writes poems to speak to the dead.

Gerburg Garmann

Gerburg Garmann, a native of Germany, is a professor of German and French at the University of Indianapolis. Her scholarly publications appear in English, French, German in international journals. Her artwork and poems have appeared in various magazines and anthologies around the world. “Painting is yet another foreign language for me and allows for aesthetic expression in form of color, shape, thought, and passion. It is a language, which can be shared by many, verbally and non-verbally.” Her mission is to inspire joyful resilience.