Poetry Suite by Kristin Chang
“A wide field, my body: both floodbait,
both places where things once grew”
Poetry by Kristin Chang
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White man on Tinder calls me Geisha
& my shadow is a stillborn.
& I drag my body behind me
like a dagger, draw a bloodless
cut through your sightline. The
truth is that a house is only a house
until you pull something out of it
and the whole thing collapses. A body
is only a body until you gasp
inside of it. Isn’t that what
you learned from the weather today
the sky collapsing like an eggshell,
bright and empty? Don’t tell me
that history is a skinless almond.
I watched a documentary that said
men were the only species
causing death from a distance,
distance as killzone: distance as motion:
distance as ownership: If I send you
my body via text, can you let
my hunger out, walk it, dog
gone it? My sexts travel the arc
of my mother’s spine. I rub
her shoulders into blades, sparks
licking my palms. No light
without friction, no pleasure
without plead. This is small talk,
all the rapeseed planted in our throats
hatch in the morning as sound:
a soldier scaling her throat.
Every morning is a new
way to burn down a house, a
a scream shucked white.
Mother says history is an
unreturned phone call, a receiver
hitting the floor. I read the news &
it tells me to marry my mouth
to a bird, to husband a door.
Sometimes my smile is a bandage,
sometimes it’s a lens cap,
sometimes I pray for a face
as white as february
or a knife to sheathe between teeth.
Sometimes I want to touch a
chest and hear a heart as it flatlines,
nothing like the ballad of a
bullet through my tongue. Nothing
like the beg of a bone burying itself
deeper.
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My brother calls himself a Twinkie, yellow on the outside & white on the inside
To be consumable / is to end at the skin / to be white / on the inside: like a pear / or a bloodless / throat. The whites / of our father’s eyes / blooding when he drinks / do you remember how he once said / that inside all our bodies / is an animal struggling / to escape? How / he wore this country / like a noose / How he told us / we all had / contracts to our land / that sometimes the body / is sport / and nothing else. His hands ripe / plums choking / on their own pits / his skin / sliding off his bones like silt / inside a color / we could not name / things that are white: fingernails / remember his fingernails / how the deadest part of ourselves / live longest / how he kept them clean / for a boss that called him / a dirty dog / father, we buried you clean / and curled like a fist / father, we buried you a blade / cleanliness, then / is not what we end / but what ends us: father, were you trying / to knife yourself / into their hands? / to occupy their bodies / like native blood? To be a bone / remembered by the bullet / Remember / how blood breaks / like light / over this land, father / Remember / father, you once told us: I want to own this body / beyond dying inside it
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Notes from Nanking
recall the color of a vulture’s wings : even light is a kind of flesh : even flesh is relative : just like time : both are measured in the length it takes : for the bullet to meet : skin spits up its color like blood : I belong in my body : like smoke belongs in the sky : you live in your body : like an occupying country : my mother says never : to look a man in his mouth : that only one species : can cause death from a distance : the way a cut can carry its hurt : is beyond memory : beyond the vulture outside : picking skin from flesh : flesh from bone : Dissect the ghost from my body : because no birth can be bloodless : if I kiss my ghost : will this story resurrect : will the army invade itself : you like to tell me : that violence is relative : while slitting my ghost with your thumbnail : tell me : if violence is relative : what is a fist to gunfire : what is a kiss to a landmine : what I mean to ask : is your body in mine : the same thing : as your country in mine : on our first date : you brought me to a zoo : called me kawaii : as I fell in love with the idea : of dying in captivity : we were watching baboons : every animal has a lifespan in captivity : every animal has consumed something dead : to stay alive : you told me my kiss : felt like evolution : I said yours : felt like extinction
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Wound theory
I walk my bloodline like a tightrope,
history sprawled in the logic of wounds:
here my mother’s veins hammered into sidewalks,
hear my sister’s blood ferried across a river
that rises like fever. Our faces in the water,
teething the tide. Mother says history is a body
digging for the right bones to make her hot again,
assembling in the dark, sewing the sky into a red skirt,
nothing so sincere as meat. As blood. On the far shore,
men scout for bodies like pockets to steal from.
Men crowd my mouth like teeth, whiteness
as consumption: my mother in America
feeds on cigarette ash and brown
sugar candy, her molars
orphaning themselves one by one.
If emptiness is quantifiable,
her mouth is an emptiness that can
be counted. If silence is just a theory,
I want no more of your theories. I want
to be like a plant, growing itself toward
light. I want to play my teeth like a piano,
thrum my veins, sound the sky into
a voice I can recognize. Once,
I swallowed your fathers like hot yolk.
Once, I knew the difference between
what I wanted and what you tried to give
me. The difference between an apple
and a fist. Both are things in the mouth,
both are why I lick myself like a knife.
My name in your mouth is a massacre,
a throat sung clean of its need. Cleanliness:
just a new way to become dust.
A wide field, my body: both floodbait,
both places where things once grew. Watch
my shadow clasped to your body like
bitter to tongue. I will watch as
you dismount your legs, bury your hands
in salt, press your lips to my breast
like the muzzle of a gun. Watch as I
nurse its mouth into a daughter’s,
watch as my bloodline threads itself
through an eye, seaming
our skirts of meat,
our bright of wounds.
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Header image courtesy of Barbara Moura. To view a gallery of her art, go here.
Kristin Chang lives in California. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in DIALOGIST, SOFTBLOW, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Powder Keg, and fog machine. She is currently on the staff of Winter Tangerine Review and is located at kristinchang.com.