“Untouchability” by Mackenzie Duan

Mackenzie Duan is a high schooler from the Bay Area who has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Youngarts, Princeton University, and The Poetry Society. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Frontier Poetry, Electric Literature, Sine Theta, and elsewhere.

Author Foreword:

Untouchability is a tribute to the few remaining survivors of the Nanjing Massacre, a six-week period in 1937 where Imperial Japanese troops tortured and killed Chinese civilians, the exact figure of which is largely disputed and ranges from 30,000 to 200,000 deaths. The extent of its brutality had been widely unknown in the West until Iris Chang published her 1991 book The Rape of Nanking, which contained extensive documentation, victim testimonies, and deeply graphic photographs. I remember leafing through my father's copy in elementary school and feeling both terrified and morbidly entranced. This poem is an attempt to unmap that terror, deliver historical corrections to present bodies, and examine the fact of grief in the face of unrelenting time.

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Untouchability 

for Iris Chang 

“It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn't say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don't talk.” 

–Shiro Azuma 

Under a roof 

of war photos. I can’t. 

Let go: the tulip 

graves. Soldier 

peeling off underwear. 

No one 

knows: a villager 

buried to the hilt of their head. 

Then dogs. Clock 

of shrapnel. Did you know? 

Did you 

want? To know: 

a Nazi saved 

Nanjing. Eyewitness 

to the breakage 

of babies in the river. 

Correction: tanks 

shearing a forest. 

The soldiers 

competed 

for kills. Crowned 

dogs. I want ending.

Still nothing 

ends, the arc 

of the bayonet 

mid-painting. Japan 

apologizes 

fifty years after. Denial 

willowed 

into mask, another shrill 

tax of unending. 

Correction: there were no walls, 

only the fact of human 

bodies. Trained to see us 

as animals. Wrong 

simile. I can’t. 

Unthink: the woman’s 

mouth in a ruched O, 

schools oranged 

by hand grenade. This plait 

of testimony. Soldiers 

die unguilty: 

of winning. Survival 

creeping to an end 

as beasts whimper 

below dirt. Correction: 

below a wind of killers. 

Nothing wrong

with immortality. Only I can’t 

unstomach. The true 

meat of their selves. I can’t 

fire. An arrow 

notched with their names. 

Gunshot wound 

like a pupil, widening, mirroring 

apology, marrying 

night. Correction: 

all soldiers 

are taught. Correction: 

to apologize 

is to desire ending. Correction: 

so many words 

lost in a red channel 

of civilians. In the lie 

of gun shells. Their organs 

inverted by dogs. Violet '

retinas. An etymology 

of corpses. Correction: 

I inherited their anatomy, 

those carbon litanies. Every apology 

already unwinding. Their fists 

still open 

in the end.