Why I Need a Son

My oldest sister-in-law pulls me into spare bedroom
during our first New Year, gives me pH strips, tells me 

I’m carrying too high; first child should hang low,
a plum pulling down on a branch. 

Shoveling too much jiāo into jiàozi sauce when boys 
needed vinegar, not knowing we had invested in flower 
headbands; chosen a name from my mother’s side. 

She told me how at three she was made jiějiě, older 
sister, a sigh throughout family back to farmland grave 
mounds—another girl to be lost at marriage. 

How could she have known family transplanted women 
like organs, love congenital heart failure? 

They gave èrjiě, second sister, to ayí, sānjiě to nàinai. 
She rubs my back, remembers bàba swore divorce if 
there was no son. Māmā taught her to wage silent war: 

chew on words like sticky rice cakes, buy shoe store, work 
fourteen-hour days, wrap chain twice before locking doors.