by Stephanie Chang
after Natsuki Takaya,
“She deserves the moon, but would never ask for it.”
You measure the dirty dishes in the sink
by the men you want to save.
This a game of telephone, bloodsong
for a body that flickers / folds
like a sail, lumps of hair
sticky, diced into black beans
and flat-pressed
to a metal beam in August.
You pick up the phone:
how can I heal you today?
The boys are out again.
They have yet to
learn gratitude into fluency.
You learn the ecology of hunger,
how to starve a mother
out of your biology.
Small caricatures, tweezed bits
of heart. You’ve got too much
to hide in the seam of
a housewife’s apron.
Hasn’t anyone taught you
how to fend for yourself?
Or do you alone recall the static
of a ribbon floating
across the hospital monitor,
straight as a fishbone?
Here are the body parts a village
will trick you into giving up,
a cat hosting a festival for one
rehearses thank you. He is healed.
*
Here your arc takes a backseat.
This an act of healing,
the script you only followed
so far. You practice
the study of respiration
or exhaling, exhaling until the cat
begs you to accept his lung,
an offering to sweeten
the absence. The lonely
motherhood has made you.
The lonely that can unskin
kindness by the head,
so heal this, heal you first.
The bridge can’t stand
if you burned it
to its foundation / to warm
the men sleeping under,
fingers hooking
you by the lip, a bluefin tuna
they try to take as
a bride. At a distance,
a rat smiles, thanks you too.
The house you return to
is motherless, the same way
you were born,
the same way you can’t
imagine leaving them.
Stephanie Chang is a high school senior from Vancouver, Canada. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Adroit Journal, and The Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. She is a National Gold Medalist in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and recipient of the Anthony Quinn Foundation Scholarship for Literary Arts. Find her at https://stephchang.weebly.com/ and https://twitter.com/stephywchang.