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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. 

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.

ISSN 2157-8079
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