Girl on girl on fire
BY K-MING CHANG
On fire I’m unfuckable, I’m war
bridegroom, the knife piloting
the wound. I’m the eye
bleeding sight. The screen scabbing
over me, the camera angled
for entry. I hook you
like a lure. I storyboard origin:
where a girl grows from god’s side
wound & my mouth
mentors her pleasure. Turn down
your eyes. I’ve little-spooned
the moon & screwed the stars
back into my skull. Whoever
said fear is a foothold
has never climbed
me. Mount an axe where the sky
should be. Mountains are named
for their view, what you want to see
atop me. Expect to bleed
today. I trade my feet
for a landscape of losses:
a sea made of teeth, your nipples
roaming my mouth. My thumbs
wet thorns, my threefold thighs
& double-dog hunger, each barkless
tree I skinned alive with my teeth. God
bills me for my birth & I pay
back with my life. I’m alive
now that I’m dead, I look
like my mother’s mother, the one
who skipped her face like a stone
across three seas, the one I receive
like a bullet to the bone, my breasts blown
glass. My knock-out ass. You can’t
convince me history isn’t
pornography. I have a body
but nowhere to bury it.
I have a harness but no horse
to breed for it. What we call
tame you call talent. What
you call country I call
no one picking up. Tonight
my mother shipwrecks my fantasies, rains
my bed into a riverbank, turns
my girl back into a pyre, my body back
to a movie birth scene, false
blood & stagelight, my mother calling cut
her out of me, the camera
my father & I
its foundling.
LETTER FROM MY GRANDMOTHER IN TSINGTAO
BY K-MING CHANG
Once in a drought, I dropped
all my children down a well
to make the water rise.
Mothers always choose their own
mouths over mourning. The myth
of hunger begins like this:
in Tsingtao, the German army
stole rice & millet, fed our bodies
to bullets. They built
churches to keep a god & barns
to keep their women. How many girls
can be stolen from
the same body? I sold
myself to a soldier
for the price of a fish.
I gutted out his green eyes,
gave them back to my children.
Even a fish mistakes the sea
for safety, the fisherman’s
hook for god. I raised you like a river
outrunning her land. I nursed you
native to thirst & rain
outsourced from a foreign sky.
I taught you to butcher
a bird & convert its bones
into perches. I taught you
every woman needs
a man like a weapon
needs motive. The nation
I was born in now
belongs to burning. History starts
like a housefire & I braid smoke
into your hair. I once beat you
for forgetting to pray
before bed. Remember
to take the lord’s name
nightly like a pill. Kneel
now & remember I knot
your tongue to mine
so you never drift far
from my hunger. I alphabetize
my gods by country
of origin, America always
first. Daughter, count soldiers
til you sleep. One of them
will hold you by the black
of your hair. One of them
will father you & the other
is your son. There is no ridding
a sheet of blood. Grieve that your eyes
are green. Surrender your skin
fasting into a white flag.
