Tina Chang

Powder rises from a compact, platters full of peppermints, a bowl of sour pudding. A cup of milk before me tastes of melted almonds. It is the story of the eve of my beginning. Gifts for me: boxes of poppies, pocket knife, an elaborate necklace made of ladybugs. My skirt rushing north There is something round and toothless about my dolls. They have no faith. Their mouths, young muscle to cut me down. Their pupils, miniature bruises. I hear the cries of horses, long faces famished, the night the barn burned. God and ashes everywhere. Burnt pennies, I loved them, I could not catch them in their copper rolling. My mother's cigarette burns amber in a crystal glass. I am in bed imagining great infernos. Ashes skimming my deep lake. The night the animals burned, I kissed the servant with the salty lips. There was a spectacular explosion, a sound that severed the nerves, I was kind to that shaking. The horses, the smell of them, like wet leaves, broken skin. Laughing against a wall, my hair sweeps the windowsill, thighs show themselves. First came my body, my statue's back, then hair electric, matches falling everywhere. Tucked in my pink canopy, I am plastic, worn cheeks grinning. I found my little ones hiding from me, crying into their sleeves. They are really from a breeze, momentarily, white. When we unburied the dolls, red ants were a fantasy feeding on them, nest of veins, shrunken salted corpses. There is mythology planted in my mouth which is like sin. Keep fires inside yourself. My mother once said,When you were a baby, I let you swim in a basin of water until your lungs stopped

I am haunted by how much our mothers do not know. How a republic falls because of its backhanded deals, stairwell secrets. My mother does not know I am lying with a man who is darker than me, that we do not have names for how we truly treat our bodies. What we do with them. The other possesses me. Without him the perception of me fails to exist. My mother now is taking her sheers and cutting through live shrimp. When I was a child she peeled each flushed grape until only the pale fleshy bead remained. She placed them onto a plate in one shining mound, deseeded, in front of me. How I sucked and bled the fruit of all their juice, hypnotized in front of the buzz of television in each version of my childhood. I am her daughter. This is certain. I am lying down with a man who is darker than me and maybe this poem is my real republic, my face is my face, or is it stolen from my mother and hung over mine? If I were a dream you could say my countenance was a string of flickering lights made of teeth or an expression unraveling like a carpet into a narrow river of another life. Does truth matter when it's floating face up or face down? The answer to this makes all the difference.

On an island, an open road where an animal has been crushed by something larger than itself. It is mangled by four o'clock light, soul sour-sweet, intestines flattened and raked by the sun, eyes still watchful, savage. This landscape of Taiwan looks like a body black and blue. On its coastline mussels have cracked their faces on rocks, clouds are collapsing onto tiny houses. And just now a monsoon has begun. It reminds me of a story my father told me: He once made the earth not in seven days but in one. His steely joints wielded lava and water and mercy in great ionic perfection. He began the world, hammering the length of trees, trees like a war of families, trees which fumbled for grand gesture. The world began in an explosion of fever and rain. He said, Tina, your body came out floating. I was born in the middle of monsoon season, palm trees tearing the tin roofs. Now as I wander to the center of the island no one will speak to me. My dialect left somewhere in his pocket, in a nursery book, a language of childsplay. Everything unfurls in pictures: soil is washed from the soles of feet, a woman runs toward her weeping son, chicken bones float in a pot full of dirty water. I return to the animal on the road. When I stoop to look at it it smells of trash, rotting vegetation, the pitiful tongue. Its claws are curled tight to its heart; eyes open eyes open. When the world began in the small factory of my father's imagination he never spoke of this gnarled concoction of bone and blood that is nothing like wonder but just the opposite, something simply ravaged. He too would die soon after the making of the world. I would go on waking, sexing, mimicking enemies. I would go on coaxed by gravity and hard science.

It wasn't holy so let us not praise gods. Let us not look to them for bread, nor the cup that changed water to wine. Let us look to the bend of the road that reaches. A silver blur across the skyline, woman standing on the farm. In her grasp, the shine that is seed, that is beginning. She will work the earth, bounty in the vault of cosmos above her, heat lightning that lassoes in its manic current. Man never existed but to invite danger. Loveless one. There was once an army of men, saluting from bayonet to bomb. They were expert at sabotage, hand combat. You stop the clock in your paltry chest. The one that says choose, choose. Wind that desired backward. Ring the alarm. When you wake, no more pain. A mirror like a window looking out. What can your past now say to you that has never been said before? What of that clock that forbade you to move forward. What of the clock that asked for nothing but passage, the minutes careening into you like a fitful arrow. What of the clock that summoned nothing, not even mercy. Once you tired of wanting, a face to break, you started the clock again.

Last night I found my face below the water in my cupped hands. The mask made of copper and bone criss-crossing to make a smirk, a false glamour, a plated glaze. I unwound myself from the heavy machinery of my body's burden. The lute, the light, chime. I'll get up and partner myself with music, the purple moon peeling itself like a plum. Men stand in a circle and they will ask and ask again. I want to pick the thick bud, to lose myself in the body's posture bending in or away, to let my majesty and birthright go and gesture toward a waking life.