Kristin Chang has been published or is forthcoming in Muzzle Magazine, Tinderbox Poetry, the Shade Journal, Perigee (Apogee Journal), and elsewhere. She has been twice-nominated for Best New Poets and is currently on staff at Winter Tangerine. Her website can be found here. Why I Write: Kristin Chang
I write because, as Jenny Zhang says, poetry can be against extinction, against a reality that "includes my extinction and my families’ extinction, and the extinction of anyone who is not white in America." What is the poetic equivalent of punching a Nazi? That's what I want to be. I am trying (and sometimes, admittedly failing) not to write for white people, not to write for nations and regimes or borders, not to write towards my extinction. It is my responsibility to write for my communities, to write from my body and its volatility; to write for more than just my survival, but also for my joy; to write like I owe nothing to my body, the nation, etc. The men in my life are always congratulating me for my selflessness, but I want to be the opposite: I want to write a self that cannot be lessened. I have no interest in being self-less or sacrificial. The poet does not forget or forgive: she haunts. She is unafraid of her anger, understands it as love. For herself.
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Imitation game
My childhood was a wingless
beating
from my mother every time I
outgrew
my clothes. I was called a fast grower
like a weed
or a disease. I wanted to love my
body
the way white people love their dogs:
as if
it can understand everything I say to it
as if
it was bred to be here
& now
my mother says don’t you understand
anything
I say Truth is, I stopped listening
in 3rd grade
Vincent Trinh copied my short-answer
question
on the Continental Congress & Ms. Ascari
told me
imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
& later
to another teacher thinking
I
was out of earshot: those people
love
to cheat, you know - wasn’t it true
I knew
the violence of the word
ear
-shot the afternoon I tell my mother I love
another
woman she is cleaning the sink,
still
dark with the blood
of
some animal. The day I was born, she
cried
all night for death, bit the tip
off
her own tongue. The first time
I kissed,
I was shocked by tongue, invasive
as
a second language. For a week
after,
I refused speech, wanting to remain
the memory
of her mouth over the memory
of mine.
My mother watches me
silent
& something strangled in her eye:
light
or maybe me. There was a time
we
were one body, lobbing
breath
between us like a ball, blood like
one
river passing through two countries.
Now
in the kitchen where she birthed me, I watch
my mother
slice meat: blue-veined & paper-thin,
improbable
wings. Neither of us moving
the distance
between us. Silence like a spilling
-over
sink.
Object permanence
My child is the size of a fly &
I zap it out of my body
with pinky-sized lightning. It is not
godly to skewer names
on each of my teeth, to shovel the night
clean of stars, moonlight
stinging medicinal. The doctor
is young & white & after, I find
a bruise hitched to my hip. I pretend
there is something still inside me
trying to get out, knocking
my skin blue. I drove home hating
the city pretending permanence, the sea
faking its sleep. I feel all my pain
in odd places: a fingertip
stirring my eye. A loop
of soreness around my neck.
I remember my father’s dead
ox, the loop of flies around its belly
smoggy with blood. I wear
my blood as a scarf, go to bars
where the light dangles likes breasts
& white men tell me I’m a bad
Buddhist, listing every Asian country
they’ve prayed in. I am thinking
about children, listing
all the places I didn’t want one.
I pray in every space
of my body, imagine the echo
of another heartbeat clasped
in mine, a red handshake,
a truce between bodies.
My child was the size of a sparrow
I shot out of the sky
at age 9. It was an accident.
An accident. I had been aiming
at something beyond, maybe a branch
dizzy-spinning with light, maybe the sky itself,
taunting me with its wholeness,
the bloodless blue width
of my waist, famishing for
any touch that tears
my eyes. I gasp at the still
-lake surface of my belly
& watch for my skin
to wave, for the darting
shapes of swimming things
to shadow my every surface,
signs of life I buried
in my body & left
for dead.
The “you” in my poems is always a woman
I bay you
in my water -soft palms, I beach on the shore
line of your spine. But I am no marine mammal, I am the map you follow
to gut it, a knife’s loving
navigation. I am not the prayer
bracketing your breath
I am the god
telling your body to be good
to me. Your skin is the sea
they rescued my mother from
her own sleep
crowding with ghosts
I feed myself to your hand. I call you
harvest, my body a season
that gives under your tongue, I
am inarticulate
appetite:
my mouth a suspense, cliff
-hanging from yours
Before I knew you, I knew
my body as a genre
of feast
I knew a man sinking
his words in my mouth
like fishhooks:
you are nothing
I can’t kill
today
the rain spells fingers
on my skin. I refuge
in the boat
-belly of your heat. I tear the skin
off the sea
and wear it, salt
our names
to preserve us
in a language we’ll eat
without end
Ku [to work on what has been spoiled, decay]
18.
-plucked & I’m dangerous, ankling into blood
& smiling, teeth all muscle-cupped pearl
the father in all our photos, candid as rot
the body: built for study or consumption, love
knows to kill an animal but take nothing from
daughter whose god is reaching for a gun
Kuei Mei [the marrying maiden]
54.
my mother married for papers & a name
is a skill to be eaten monogamy a jaw has
cleaved every siren in half & eaten its source, it
cuts from my skin & gaps from my blood,
I’m home & I have doubled my bite, shaken the
100 words for god & not one meaning husband
Chung Fu [inner truth]
61.
less & yes I have kissed a girl & been nothing
worse to witness. I live by no likeness, no god
is my father feeling me for fever. I am
language as surgery or even just karma
is custody over your own ghosts. I don’t know
mourning, only dusk: light dying its way home
NOTE: This form I invented, called the I-Ching, can be read both top-to-bottom and bottom-to-top. Start from the last line and read upwards (left to right, as you do ordinarily), or start from the first line and read downwards. Each verse is structured in the shape of an I-Ching hexagram based on Chinese divination (traditionally, hexagram lines are divined bottom-to-top), and the titles are derived from the names of the hexagrams as well.