a postcolonial portrait of the girl loving a girl
by Kristin Chang
how our bodies domesticate
disaster: by swallowing
another country’s rains. By reining
my jaw to the sea, my bones
lurched into boats. My breasts bitten
into apples. My mother says
women who sleep with women are
redundant: the body symmetrical
to its crime. Between your knees,
I mistake need for belief
in a father figure: once, we renamed
our fathers by burning them
out of our bodies, smoking the sky
into meat. I have my father’s
name: 张, meaning archer.
I consider coming clean
through your body like an arrow. I consider
the way we shape in bed, like the sea
has revised its shoreline & we must
move accordingly. According
to my mother, it is best for a woman
to be thin, to eat without
waist. It is best to pickle
the tongue in pepper,
water & salt, to feed on silence.
When I kiss you, I remember
every silence begins inside
a mouth. Everything edible
begins as a bird. At night, birds
peck eyeholes into the dark,
the way I have always watched
women: in the distance
between a girl & herself
is an entire body
of arrows, flesh pocketing
its holes. A girl castling
her voice into a throat
of stone. It is natural,
kissing you. It is natural, tasting
salt afterwards, tracing
where light through a window
veins your body, its wanting
to reroute your blood
someplace safe.
disaster: by swallowing
another country’s rains. By reining
my jaw to the sea, my bones
lurched into boats. My breasts bitten
into apples. My mother says
women who sleep with women are
redundant: the body symmetrical
to its crime. Between your knees,
I mistake need for belief
in a father figure: once, we renamed
our fathers by burning them
out of our bodies, smoking the sky
into meat. I have my father’s
name: 张, meaning archer.
I consider coming clean
through your body like an arrow. I consider
the way we shape in bed, like the sea
has revised its shoreline & we must
move accordingly. According
to my mother, it is best for a woman
to be thin, to eat without
waist. It is best to pickle
the tongue in pepper,
water & salt, to feed on silence.
When I kiss you, I remember
every silence begins inside
a mouth. Everything edible
begins as a bird. At night, birds
peck eyeholes into the dark,
the way I have always watched
women: in the distance
between a girl & herself
is an entire body
of arrows, flesh pocketing
its holes. A girl castling
her voice into a throat
of stone. It is natural,
kissing you. It is natural, tasting
salt afterwards, tracing
where light through a window
veins your body, its wanting
to reroute your blood
someplace safe.
Kristin Chang lives in NY and edits for Winter Tangerine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Teen Vogue, The Margins, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. More of her work is located at kristinchang.com and on Twitter (@KXinming). Her debut chapbook Past Lives, Future Bodies is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in 2018.