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The document of invisibility states that I must first recollect the beginning of my erasure,  which would summon me to a crag where I  stand before my birth. Thousands of years ago, there existed a farmland, a kingdom, and a grave site where a fire was built. Around a burial, there was shaped a ritual with fire at the center. If I moved my hand close to it, it didn’t burn, warmed by the light of an ancestor, who was raised on the precipice of darkness. In this space of razor existence, it seemed both plausible and impossible that I would be born, a very strong wind blew. It set ablaze the trees and in time, a wildfire. It was from such a tragedy, that I found my origin. From it, I emerged, untouched by flame but smoldering, watchful and wary but sheltered from burning. I came from this  colossal heat which touched an original brightness. I was born an ember of wanting. It was destined for the seekers to hunt for this threat of desire. The disappearances were inevitable.
VERSIONS OF GIRLHOOD
by TINA CHANG
I listen to my daughter’s voice loop
from years ago. I miss her past self.
Her present self hears her own voice singing.
I love both girls who came from me.
I am the woman who made her, the woman
so hard to love now, at times bitter to the bone.
Often, a grey demon bites my neck. Aging,
I salvage the drainage. Paint me gold again,

hold me in your vice embrace, I say to a past
that has already let me go. I pray to the night,
I pray to the orchard, I pray to the chill
and the underside of the moon, who shines
its light so vividly, I feel crushed by beauty.
I love this earth who greets me in waist high
grass. My daughter is a tender shoot,
mothered, until she is an orchestra of light.
Along the horizon, fire ripens into rose,
softer with age, when my feet land on roots,
which twist through me without force
but fragility, without bitterness but belonging.
THE DOCUMENT OF VISIBILITY
by TINA CHANG
states that I must find a lake filled with ink. It   is bottomless where I shape myself as a night animal, covered in the color of a century. I emerge crawling to land, my limbs wondrous, my mind endless. Around me, flower after flower, the fire of my pen. Wherever I step, the seekers note the scent. They have an appetite  for my kind. They open and close their mouths signaling language, hunger, sirens ripe with song. When I’m tired and lean against a tree, I feel the glue of sap when I touch the bark, the pull of its origin which existed before me. We are, all of us, running toward the future. What    I thought I was escaping, was with me all along.

author pic here
 Tina Chang  is the author of the poetry collections Hybrida, Of Gods & Strangers, and Half-Lit Houses. She is also co-editor of the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate fellowship, as well as awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, among many others. In 2010, she was named the first female Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and she served in this role for over a decade. She lives in Brooklyn and is Professor of English at Binghamton University. She is Visiting Professor at Harvard University. Her forthcoming collection, Lion, will be published by W.W. Norton in fall, 2026.


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