Heather Qin
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Stolen Ghazal

Last night, the blood moon swallowed the center of the universe, stole
light years from the stars. Twenty years ago, grandmother stole

grain to feed her girls as the sky soaked her vegetable garden with
bullets. When the Red Guard arrived, modernity stole

anything older than I was: mother’s fashion magazines, jade
bracelets, lineage from viscera. That night, mother caught me stealing

away to the garden, sentenced me to hide where no one would
want to look. I sung in a language I learned to steal

from her mouth, grief as exodus. When the new textbooks came, covers
stained with widows and flattened rebellions, mother burned them. She stole

history back one dynasty at a time as she taught by candlelight. I asked her why
they wanted us to forget the skulls bursting like cherry bombs. So they could steal

our lives again: my brother another estimated casualty. My mother pointed
at the textbook: famine overwritten by prosperity, an autobiography of stolen

victories. This, too, is an act of violence. My greatest ambition was to learn
the trick to satisfaction: if I weaned my body from need and belief, stealing

anything would be impossible. The night brother left for Mongolia, I watched
mother’s back fold like a burden as she mended a dress the furious years stole.

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Heather Qin (she/her) is from New Jersey. Her work has been recognized by the New York Times, Columbia College Chicago, and Hollins University, and can be found or forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Pidgeonholes, and Diode, among others. Besides writing, Heather loves classical music and reading.