Kristin Chang has been published or is forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry, The Margins (Asian American Writers Workshop), Connotation Press, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for Best New Poets and Best of the Net. Located at kristinchang.com, she is currently on staff at Winter Tangerine.
at the contra costa west county detainment center in richmond, CA
for nine months, my father is a body with the blood chased out. for nine months, my father is a stir in the grass, a boy whittled down like a cross. for nine months, it does not rain. for nine months, my father repeats the legend of the gourd princess, the girl born between two estates, the girl we cleaved in two, the girl we killed to keep. for nine months, my father watches his body become a rumor of him. for nine months, my father rinses his mouth with piss. for nine months, my father writes no letters. for nine months, my father carries his language in him like a dead infant. for nine months, my father tears the light in his cell to bandages. for nine months, my father says our names in the dark. for nine months, my father reverse-engineers his body, finds nothing but a burnt-down fuse. for nine months, the guards call him their chink, slit his eyes with their flashlights, tunnel his throat with their nightsticks. for nine months, my father burns his beard like incense. for nine months, my father shrinks around his spine until I can hilt his body in one fist.
anatomy lesson
I built myself like a war exhibit : inside my mother’s body : is an anthill on fire : is heat : like a fever : knowing exactly : what parts of you : to kill : the god that sets down your body : and walks away : pray : to be a more original victim : originally, there was no eve : only eve’s asian half-sister : who unkneaded adam : with her bare hands hueing : a new path home : is where my father : planted himself like a knife : my father homing : in my hips : like shrapnel : america left : 80 million unexploded bombs : in laos : my grandmother says every heart : is a flightless bird : according to history : there has never been a species : that evolves toward flight : so I swallow a sparrow : let it feather my teethgaps : beakbright my piss : I decide to leave : my body for better weather : fly south : to laos : bombs bedded : like women : I learn distance : is just another way to measure : impact : I remind myself : to water the battle : ground into a garden : to press my ear to every wound : and hear it hum : itself a home
defense mechanisms
unbury the sword from my side suck it like a thumb I don’t want a family
I want a fire I want to smoke the bones out of my thighs shoot them
out of a rifle move a ghost through your mouth and it’ll come out a
rain bake your cheeks in a pan and they’ll rise like the scars of
birth have you ever seen your mama naked the doctor once panned her blood for
gold found nothing but her heart a big apple of beef sometimes I kill the
squirrels in my yard by feeding them my earrings bury them by the dozen
water them into trees they say cruelty is our finest trait I like the idea of a
Great Wall a way to amass your dead to pretend ruin is the end goal in
Chinese zoos you can watch a tiger fell a deer as long as you pay for the deer this
country prefers me dear as a doll in the window of a butchershop
is a flank so fresh it mistakes the shimmy of a blade for a mothering
bone at night the neighbor boy and I hunt for moths by lighting up
the doghouse moths are attracted to what hurts them the neighbor boy writes me
letters that start dear empress let me taste the slant of your eyes are my alibi
one day I’ll bat my eyes into outerspace then eat the bat woodshards
slanting out of my belly
I quill me into the most dangerous thing I know
US-Born Pandas Experience Culture Shock in China: refuse local food, don’t understand Chinese
Mei Lun and Mei Huan’s names
come from a Chinese idiom meaning
something indescribably beautiful
and magnificent
Mei Lun and Mei Huan
don’t seem to care for Chinese food
don’t understand the local language
do not respond when spoken to
Mei Lun and Mei Huan
do understand some English commands
such as come here and
leave here
51,000 American people voted
to choose their names. Adorable and cuddly
animals have helped China build diplomatic
relationships with the United States
China stopped sending pandas
as free gifts in 1982. All the bears
given since
have been on loan
all light is buried
where it breeds. all
bodies are different
acts of the same goal
survival: when the body exceeds its job
it becomes part of an agenda. China
shoots another dog into space. at a distance,
every planet is a pupil drowning in its eye
between my mother and I,
a river where we scatter
seeds for a sea: fish bones,
registration numbers, shrapnel
skating the skin.
according to national geographic,
homing is the process of animals
returning to their birthplace to breed
or die. in my mother’s country
there is only rain that dreams
itself into our mouths, only guavas
that grow grenade pins. what only
animals know is that haunting
holds even the bones who leave
their hosts. that a body
can only return to itself,
take back what is theirs.
Text from first four stanzas comes from the ABC news article “US-Born Pandas Experience Culture Shock in China” and the Daily News article “US-Born pandas refuse food, don’t understand Chinese”
Outcall #
The news will say I sold my body
as if it were ever mine to sell. Deduct
my mouth from my mouth
and it is a buttonhole, unbutton
my eyelids and my eyes flock out
like crows of steam, unrope his hands
from my neck and bow
-tie them around my ribcage,
I confess I wanted to crack
open like a window. I wanted
to twist out all my teeth
and put them in his shoes
like rocks, a pain
to feel later. At night
I dream every
beddable body bled
out into a bowl. Every hour
loosens like a molar
and gnaws you into its
shape. Remember
the summer I blindfolded
my father’s rifle and kissed
a boy behind his barn?
How I punched him later
for calling me his girl
gook, I confess I only
wanted the proof
of after: a bruise to find
in the morning, or my teeth
a row of broken
-in houses, a moan
taped over my mouth,
any evidence of my body
keeping alive
its crimes, any evidence
that the body bends
not only to break. The rooms
below us will imagine
a stampede of wild ponies
or a river with a punched
-in mouth, outside
the cop car like a fist-dent
in the dark, the TV playing
latenight news Massage Parlor
Busted For Prostitution Ring
Every Girl Deported my
greencard flickers between
his teeth like a past meal’s
meat and I wet the bed
into a lake, I open my thighs wider
and a planet slips out. In the morning I
hang it in the sky like a harvest moon
watch it carve its boon: my flesh
fulling in a field, my melonbelly,
my hips sawed to handholds,
the hole he made in me
clean as a coin.
Outcall #
I am naked and not even
that is the truth.
Outside the motel,
the trees perform a trust fall,
the sky bloodies with birds
and I swallow my left hand,
the one I put on a leash
for the neighbor boys to pet
and name. When he leaves
me like a stolen car,
I remember the rules: never
ask about his son,
about your age now,
actually. What’s closer to god:
thirst or confession?
Confession: I once dropped
my tongue like a handleless blade
Confession: at night I
borrow your mother’s tongue,
I filet it nice, I take a bath in the juices
I eat it, then dream in circles about
selling myself for an electric flyswatter
and then growing flywings,
this is evolution saying my death
has already happened, when I was born
the doctor
diapered me
weighed me
then drew me a chalk outline,
told my mother she’ll
grow into it. Some animals
learn camouflage or play dead,
I learn to sleep on my back
so I can look every man
in the mouth. In the morning,
a heelprint where my bed should be
Peepholes where my eyes should be