Jenny Qi is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Focal Point. She is currently working on a hybrid collection titled Liminal Bodies and a memoir in essays in conversation with her late mother's memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and life in Las Vegas. A freelance writer and erstwhile scientist, she holds a PhD in Biomedical Science from UCSF.
The Shape of Salt
Have you ever tasted
so much salt it turned bitter?
The time I poured without looking
a cup of sea salt in a gallon of soup,
how I tried this and that to save it—
remembered my father's trick
from his first restaurant job in America,
two parts salty, one part sweet—
having learned that every bit is precious.
How does that Tang poem go?
The rice farmer sweats under the hot sun.
Every grain borrowed from his bitter days.
A college friend lamented how she’d grown fat
off this poem, guiltily picked every plate clean.
In Chinese, Tang is a homophone for sugar.
A bittersweet moment, this remembering,
light flashing in the brain to stop and go. What
are memories if not flashes of light, contained
as in a prison? Something like the opposite
of prisms’ buoyant refraction. Remember
the light bending over the bay, how bright
it still looks, this sprightly blue not often
the way of things. More often fighting
the current, tasting iron and salt.
