Circle [1 ed.] 9780809388332, 9780809326181

Citation preview

circle p o e m s

b y

victoria chang

circle Crab Orchard Series in Poetry

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open competition award

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circle poems by victoria chang Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale

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Copyright © 2005 by Victoria Chang All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 08

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The Crab Orchard Series in Poetry is a joint publishing venture of Southern Illinois University Press and Crab Orchard Review. This series has been made possible by the generous support of the Office of the President of Southern Illinois University and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor: Jon Tribble Open Competition Award Judge for 2004: Richard Cecil Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chang, Victoria M., 1970– Circle / Victoria Chang. p. cm. — (Crab Orchard series in poetry) I. Title II. Series: Crab Orchard award series in poetry. ps3603.h3575c57 2005 811'.6—dc22 isbn 0-8093-2618-3 2004023935 Printed on recycled paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

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To my family and husband, Todd

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Contents Acknowledgments ix

pa rt o n e

on quitting

To Want 3 Sarah Emma Edmonds 4 Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden 5 Lisa Fremont 6 Yang Gui Fei 8 Seven Reasons for Divorce 9 On Sameness 11 Year of the Bombshell 12 Hong Kong Flower Lounge 14 Man in the White Truck 15 Preparations 16 KitchenAid Epicurean Stand Mixer 17 Edward Hopper Studies Hotel Room 18 Office at Night 19 Room in New York 20 Before 21 On Quitting 23

pa rt t wo

five-year plan

The Laws of the Garden 27 Five-Year Plan 28 $4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch 30 The Goal 31 Chinese Speech Contest 32 Holiday Parties 33 An Evening at the Chinese Opera 35 Morning Porridge 36 At Lake Michigan 37 There Is Something about the East Coast 38 Golden Valley 39

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First Halloween 40 Majority Rules 41 Mostly Ocean 42 Dragon Inn 43

p a rt t h r e e

limits

Lantern Festival 47 Flight 48 The Tower of London 50 Seven Changs 51 Planting Tulips 52 Instinct 53 Damage 54 Gamble House 56 Human Inventory 57 Limits 58 Animal Models 59 Taiwan Independence 60 Grooming 61 Face 62 Meditation at Petoskey 63

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Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of the following publications, in which these poems previously appeared, sometimes in different form: Crab Orchard Review—“An Evening at the Chinese Opera,” “Lisa Fremont,” “Dragon Inn,” and “KitchenAid Epicurean Stand Mixer” Florida Review—“The Laws of the Garden” Gulf Coast—“$4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch” Kenyon Review—“Lantern Festival” and “Instinct” Massachusetts Review—“Preparations” Michigan Quarterly Review—“Seven Changs” The Nation—“Morning Porridge” (as “Morning Ritual”) New England Review—“On Quitting,” “Hong Kong Flower Lounge,” “To Want,” and “Yang Gui Fei” New Letters—“Before” North American Review—“Edward Hopper Study: Office at Night” and “The Goal” Pleiades—“Man in the White Truck” Poetry—“Edward Hopper Study: Room in New York” and “Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room” Poetry Daily—“Five-Year Plan” Slate—“Holiday Parties” Threepenny Review—“Five-Year Plan” Virginia Quarterly Review—“Sarah Emma Edmonds” and “Planting Tulips” “Mostly Ocean” appeared in Shade 2005: An Anthology, New Fiction and Poetry (Four Way Books, 2005). “Five-Year Plan” appeared in All This Useless Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets on Housework (University of Iowa Press, 2005). “Morning Porridge” appeared in Literature: The Human Experience Reading and Writing (Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2005). I also wish to thank the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers for a full scholarship (Holden Minority Scholarship), the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference for a John Atherton Scholarship in Poetry, the Kenyon Review Writer’s Conference for a Peter Taylor Fellowship, and the University of Michigan for a Hopwood Award. These generous gifts of financial support and time allowed me to complete this manuscript. This book was also completed with generous support and encouragement from many friends and mentors.

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part one on quitting The human mind always makes progress, but it is a progress in spirals.

—germaine de stael

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To Want To wait is to want more. Or to think you want more. Take a look backyard for the stitches that seam everything together. It’s unruly back there, yes, but when there is time, weeds want and want, an infinite accordion—to want what they cannot have, no mirrors to show them how they look or lie. How many toys do children need? For my home, a rug, yoga mat, clear wax candles, bath rack with bubble crystals, a man. You are not for sale, but other women do not know this. You do not bother telling them. I am tempted to dial each of them up, to inform them (because of my compassion) of their safety violation. Wait. Dig a garden. Eat only junk food. Buy a strange pet with short legs. Always pick up the phone when you call.

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Sarah Emma Edmonds

who enlisted in the Union Army as Frank Thompson

I am the breath of a fevered lion. Everything here is made of beard. The floors I sleep on hard as stale bread. I am the meat in the mouth of a feeding lion. Each night I listen to the unfamiliar snores of soldiers and the moon’s bruises. I am the breath in the lung of lion. I would have been flowering a pot or chopping onions, lamb limp in a pot. I am the shards of a sail across a sea. Are there any seas that know women? And for a gun touched by a woman’s hand, its collar ripped open in heat, what could be better? It’s about being dragged by the hair. I am the dirty hair. I am the footsteps under a tongue. I’d rather take a shot in the arm than to miss the Mediterranean and all of its marble.

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Eva Braun at Berchtesgaden The lightning tucked behind cypress trees. Even the crickets gone away. The phonograph with its straw voice of static and skips. Her silk robe swelled through corridors, tangles of foam curlers, lipstick. Then military boots, chandelier covered by webs of cigar smoke. All evening, snow growing on the cypress, knives on china, scent of roast beef, plucks of muscle. Then the key sliding into her bedroom lock, loosened ribbons on her nightgown, his cold tongue, like sponge and beef.

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Lisa Fremont

from Hitchcock’s Rear Window

She says she would follow him across tundras, through forests with green roofs, sweat, caked dirt. She would give up the cover of Life Magazine, lunches with women held up by thin necks. She thinks she would give up tables of pyramid stacked with Gruyère cheese and salmon, finger sandwiches crumbling like an ocean, daily visits from suitors, the haute-couture one-piece dress. But who wouldn’t want a tailor-made dress, stitched by Balmain, Chanel, Guy Laroche? Fabric that follows the contour of the body, made by physicians of figures, fold and stitch, slipstitch the casing, a dress that makes any shape look good. Who wouldn’t want to sleuth, telescope in hand, tiptoeing with binoculars, poking in Thorwald’s drawers, the underground world of hashish, saws, and crowbars? How strangely her many selves paradox one another, fight for light. What is it that each wants, driving and driving towards a surface? We think she is a precursor, cursed in a betweenness. When he sees her, he only sees petals of Teton sky,

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too perfect to break, as she swings in a cage, chirping, waiting for him to fill her dish with food. But I love how nothing in her minds her state, how she lets others, much later, mind for her.

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Yang Gui Fei

During the end of the T’ang Dynasty (AD 618–907 ), Yang Gui Fei was the favored concubine of Emperor Li Long-Ji. She was forced to commit suicide on the slopes of Mangwei Village.

Surely you know I will rule your besieged kingdom in the afterlife, build the rivers so they flow into a great bath, populate the land with plum trees, foliate the skies with golden birds. Once I was more than a woman, more than a gold hairpin, more than three thousand bathing concubines. Once the soldiers followed the scents of my long braiding curls, cording around my neck. They followed a peeling leader who trailed me the way a buzzard steals breath from the dying. Surely you know that on this slope, aspens and spruce will eventually be wrapped in fencing, honeysuckles hung with mesh, petunias draped by a stockade fence, tethered animals will go round and round a tree until they strangle themselves. My body will hang without its shadow.

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Seven Reasons for Divorce

During the Shang Dynasty (1765–1123 BC)

Disobedience (to in-laws) I am the girl who wakes within an ocean, making winter melon soup for my mother-in-law, whose taste buds rise like thorns. Jealousy Your new maid returns to your room again. I am in the kitchen, chopping pork into a guillotine of red river. The stew smells like your boiling heart. Disease I am thinning, unable to hold even a hairpin up. My body pocked like a Fabergé egg. My face in the mirror has a hole in it. Why won’t it grow back? Adultery He built a hurricane for me. You had the same chance to hunt in me. Idiot. How you missed my heart in its throbbing coat, I will never know. Stealing Yes, I ate them. The red bean, a roiling surf on my tongue turned to mud only because you found out.

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Bareness Something is thundering in my body. You can hear it in the soil, bulbs breaking out into a cathedral. Talking too much I still mean what I did not say.

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On Sameness That was a time when men spilled of land and bond. They died of diseases, drowning, a sneeze, fair skin. They often made love to more than one. They sawed down mountains, drank whiskey from the bottle. They went out again and again, only coming back for a pillow or a turkey leg. Yet still, Scarlett married Rhett—a man clearly in need of rest from electives, from himself. How easily we forget his tongue with its serrated edges. He shot men in the back, against women’s gowns, against mansions and plantations filled with waiting, sweeping, scheming, waiting women, powdered skin, bonnets, barbecues. Yet still, Scarlett loved Ashley—a man clearly in need of sun or some form of fire. How easily we forget he kissed her in the barn, her neck bent like a bleached poppy. But who’s keeping time? Now I know why we love old toys. Their women forgot how to swallow ocean too, mopping it up instead.

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Year of the Bombshell This year I decided to be a bombshell. I played bottle-cap table hockey with strangers and trained my brain to say yes to martinis carried by men with small biographies. I didn’t even mind men who smoothed my many selves into a handkerchief. I suddenly believed in Chinese astrology— the restaurant placemat sort. This year I even called the man in the white truck and he actually came over. My nervousness led me to spit out Socrates and feed on his beating skin. Suddenly I thought there was only one Lord of man, keeper of the persimmon’s cartilage, despite his split ends and small forehead. And I waited every day for his calls, when he complained about his girlfriend from the neck down and up. How did I go from “Gertrude” to bombshell back to Gertrude again, waiting and wanting—my mind gone nova into a white hospital coat. Maybe bombshells also mind being

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tossed aside like clocks? I’ll never know what makes us seem so different. I only dreamt of his long brown back, small gasp, grasp of his shirt, each memory, a knife’s edge skidding my stomach, just barely cutting.

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Hong Kong Flower Lounge They say fat finds the female brain, while the heart remains thin. And it was as if the waitresses knew my plan to win him from her, or at least to test him out. I blamed my lack of progress on the waitresses (pushers of carts). They returned, a finding-lost-money obsession. Glass of water? Chicken feet? Pork bun? As if to say, help, we must extinguish her. I wanted him to tell her about our autumns in Vermont (well not really, but close enough), the autumns in his mind of Vermont, or the Vermont in my autumn— any combination to avoid lines, the shopping mall of men. And it didn’t matter that I recently had my stomach pumped of cheating ones, the spraining-of-the-heart kind. Who said good habits pay off later? They just left me on the couch alone, watching the best of the new season, the hottest gadgets and ab-crunchers. Your skin is the only suit you’ll have for a lifetime. Mine, the darkest shade— darker than the fish’s eye.

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Man in the White Truck Each night your newly learned tricks, an infinite pit of don’t call, don’t write, call, don’t write, don’t call, just write. Each dusk I splurge, fill empty flasks, spend money I don’t have, eat donuts I don’t need. I am stalling on a stool at a coffee shop, having what the next table thinks is boring shrimp and cocktail talk with you. Or perhaps I am in your truck, cutting air, an underbelly of an aluminum can. How orange the earth is there, so extraordinarily fire. And I wonder why I am not on your list of the ten most stolen, welding my dress into a prison. Some say you have no heart, but it is beating you to death.

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Preparations What happens is it happens. It’s cheap to live here: steel frames, railroad, asphalt shingles, advice from other women. Their opinions beckon October after October, wrap like a blue shawl. Now they’re old enough to say, I know, honey, it happens to all of us. When he went out again and again, in search of more than me, my genetics told me to bake a bundt cake: his favorite, my currency. The act of setup— of calming a sweating mind, spoon next to meat knife, fish knife, oyster fork, grapefruit spoon—of preparation. I’ve always known the answers to my own questions—cumin, curry, mixed with spit, of what to say, the how to of control, the where were you, upon his return. But my tongue always hung in its dark cave, like cement. And I didn’t know how to break it.

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KitchenAid Epicurean Stand Mixer Another year has passed and she never thought she’d Get to thirty-three years without one. One day, when she was seven, On the kitchen table stood a chrome KitchenAid. Daring to put forth a vision, blended with Hearth, she promised herself that, On that special day of white cakes stacked to sky, Under a crescent moon with her man, Slung in his arms, gliding to band tunes, Emptying her heart to pour in his ambitions, Welcoming gifts from relatives she somewhat knew, In her arms, she would have a KitchenAid, Full of features and heavy-duty processing capability, Easy to assemble with a double whisk attachment, Head tilting back so it’s easy to Add ingredients and scrape down the sides of the bowl, Sensors maintain a constant speed regardless of load, And a soft-start feature reduces spattering. KitchenAids still line the shelves at Williams-Sonoma In military formations on her thirty-third birthday. Their smooth bodies feel like butterfat, Curves covered with enamel, boasting form and function. Her eyes meet the hunter green one in the middle, Everything she’s wanted in life in this box, Never imagined she would not be married by now, And still living with a roommate in a flat, Intimate with a new man every eight months, Dancing in circles, spinning around and around.

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Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room While the man is away telling his wife about the red-corseted woman, the woman waits on the queen-sized bed. You’d expect her quiet in the fist of a copper statue. Half her face, a shade of golden meringue, the other half, the dark of cattails. Her mouth even— too straight, as if she doubted her made decision, the way women do. In her hands, a yellow letter creased, like her hunched back. Her dress limp on a green chair. In front, a man’s satchel and briefcase. On a dresser, a hat with a Ceylon feather. That is all the artist left us with, knowing we would turn the woman’s stone into ours, a thirst for the self in everything—even in the sweet chinks of mandarin.

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Edward Hopper Study: Office at Night She wishes the man at the desk were a flambéed banana that she might nibble. One hand lodged in the filing cabinet, the other waits to enter, settling against the open drawer. She glances down at the carpet, the color of an unripe mango. As for the man, he likes how the light mimics the mood of a hospital corridor. He is afraid to look at her, to consider the field between her breasts. He thinks of green ledgers with red lines, commas, numbers lit by the banker lamp’s gaseous glow. But he returns to the number eight. Its curves make him think of her bareness, how her body might stiffen in fever, just for a moment, before she falls on him, the way a washrag spreads in a basin.

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Edward Hopper Study: Room in New York The woman’s finger hangs above the F key. She always wears the same red dress. The man’s hands cup the newspaper edge, his face ashen, half-edible. The woman’s back to the man, head down, her arm, dairy and bloated, long before men preferred peeling brown shoulders, the midriff. She can’t leave him, doesn’t know how. How many times have you heard this? You will hear it again and again, like the F key that in a moment will glaze the room with its throbbing mouth.

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Before Where to begin after so long? Without really knowing him, it’s hard to tell if he’s a true fan or just fickle. Before him, I couldn’t eat or sleep or did too much of both. But tonight I’ll start with the shave— I think he craves legs. I’ll lean over in the shower and shave up the entire thigh for once, instead of stopping at the knees, until I catch sight of the back and wonder, can cellulite be cured? Then there’s the tennis elbow that slows my grip, but it’s too late for steroid therapy. Can they do breast implants in an hour? There’s always the pimple on my forehead that I could plan a garden around. I heard a dab of egg white works. Next it’s the tweezing of hair between my eyebrows— the camera always spots liars. The TV in the other room says searchers found a girl’s body today. And I wonder why death is worth talking about. I already have

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the hottest shoes, I’ve studied Suddenly Single—Bounce Back with a 3-Step Plan twice. But the corset in my closet still carries its tags. Each year my horoscope says it’s my year for love, as I walk through rooms, tall and white, carried by some current.

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On Quitting How many times will I quit you, how many times will you amend me, stitch, and mend me again? In college, I could see the world’s thirty most powerful women clearly. Now I imagine what to tell my unborn children as they watch his tune-ups—just minor tweaks here and there, only after I’ve bought into the program. I’ve always looked great on three hours of sleep, bleeding at the eyes, away from garden gloves, Tilex with special bleach, from Kama Sutra’s love secrets. No winter squash, gourds, Indian corn, pumpkins tucked in fall. Instead, I’ve repositioned my portfolio on its edge again, autumn planters on their side from wind—too much focus on streets and lights, on keeping. How many times have you found me out, molding your lips with an industrial tongue, noting other women’s skills for soap-making, sweeping, making ordinary tasks enjoyable. Each time I set the table, I move you one more seat away.

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part two five-year plan The future is the past returning through another gate.

—arnold h. glasgow

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The Laws of the Garden When I was twelve, my body yearned to hear stories of love and how mergers eventually led to mitosis. My father believed in the Confucian single standard, he told me sex was for kestrels, killdeer. My brain became linear, single-track. Scepter in hand, the boy told the class, I was the ugliest thing. I believed him and thought he was infinitely excellent. After that, I never left the garden. In the summers, my father planted rutabagas a foot from the bok choy. He never noticed that I watched him beat the earth, his motions like mastodon. He never saw that day after day, I never left the yard.

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Five-Year Plan A good Chinese American housewife has a five-year plan. It’s strategic, sparse, menacing. It stutters at nothing, a tin present tense, perhaps a new VCR in two years. A good Chinese American daughter washes windows and retains curvatures. And when I’m finished, I revise my five-year plan to exclude windowwashing, to include speaker of the house in two years, in four, maybe president. And a good Chinese daughter and housewife has a ten-year plan, but the sum of parts does not equal the whole. And when did this dimming and mapping start? When did kicking apart and putting back together tread? At birth, a contract must occur, because all Chinese parents ask new son-in-laws: Do you have pension? And it’s reinforced, the way a rubber snake sneaks and scares. It’s not amazing that we can balance eggs on our heads and fix a man’s heart together. We have degrees in everything and nothing. We can polish cats while solving proofs, like belching and breathing. And all this

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premeditation, like sugar in theory, but really tastes aluminum, clogs the esophagus. It always grows back, never reaches twentytwenty and there is no standard deviation, no chance for seeing a spare owl or the red fox that wanders just beyond the border. All knew I would “make it,” or at least control it to a strangle so that the throat only brings in half the air.

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$4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch I am paper mats, plotted with Chinese horoscopes, snake, dog, cock, table after table of predictable entertainment. I am wallpaper with raised velvet flowers, peeling at the seams. I am the crack of the toilet seat my father cleans with Comet and a sponge. I am the back booth bandaged with duct tape. I am freshly wrapped egg rolls, candle glows stacked in a pyramid. I am the cook arguing with his wife, his face pasted with pork fat. I am trays of sweet-and-sour pork, fried rice, fried noodles, egg foo young, over blue flames that sway like feathers. I am the two-hundredpound fathers with untucked shirts. I am my mother filling trays with food, all tasting the same but wearing different clothes. I am the bell on the door at two-thirty, tired from thrashing. I am my father in the back booth with his calculator, soot rooted in the corner of the keys. I am my father, mumbling, hunching, punching keys over and over. I am the minus symbol, with its turquoise hue, that never disappears.

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The Goal My father’s body curled like a fist as he perched over the pavement, unhandsome with manuals and parts, brackets and backboard. He was lost in the alleys of his city, where genetics still mattered, and alleles meant pair. One dusk, the backboard mounted against the moon, against crickets working. I tossed the ball, watched the net open its walls. Each night, I barreled to the net with ease, found the unfindable opening, until the pole shifted in the mud, like my father’s eyes when he knew I was getting too good.

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Chinese Speech Contest Shi or “is,” mystic and micro, but matters, and I am a fool for getting it wrong on my tongue each time, shi should be easy, the beginning of shit, like cowshit, an easy whip of the lips. But we’re all stiff mutes, trembling tongues, waiting for cowbells for time’s up. Forgetting memorized lines led to a resewn face. And we all knew there only could be one real winner, the way we knew batteries could not be recycled. It’s ingrained, engraved, no such thing as a win-win. Immigrants in their evening gowns, not quite scholars, barely-there business people, nearly-made somethings. On that stage, inflections mattered, amputations of sentences would get you a red ear. I would return to that stage again and again if I could sow those words onto a land I recognized. Let others straighten their backs to crag, burning with winning blood. Let others who want and want weed those words from some other land.

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Holiday Parties Every holiday my parents search for a cure for eating too much for me. Their six steps to flawless skin turn to seven, eight, nine, when they see mine. My sister and I parade through parties, looking for little pies to nibble on. The nearly-thirty and still single crowd collects, watching our watches, spreads of neatly lined figs, punch, boring conversation, dish of spirits, a rug I keep tripping over. We shake each boy’s hand and smile. I love how faithfully the snacks are always laid out, watermelon seeds, dried plums, shrimp chips, in serving boats, buoyed by beginning. How long will it stay afloat? They all think we need to be saved. Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’ve already won the tourniquet. I only think of the man in the white truck. I wish I could tell my mother about him, preferably with a walkie-talkie. That way I won’t have to see her face spool suddenly with bruises when I tell her he does decorative tiling (yes, construction). I’ve never

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told her I have a hidden talent for loving men with only three chambers in the heart, his salted lips, iron aftertaste of an imagined kiss.

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An Evening at the Chinese Opera Rows of Chinese ladies with allen-wrench backs, cracked English, hints of mothballs. They speared each other for a front row seat. I’m above all of this, I thought. A man with red and white cheeks stepped on stage, blue around his eyes suggested war. Cymbals connected, gongs settled into the shape of my chest. How it took thousands of years to work this out, I’ll never understand. The clanging, compressed music, as though defying sparseness. The yellow tassel on his sword swayed from an audience sneeze, misted and uncovered. The gong halted with sweeps of a shrilled stringed instrument, like echoes of chickens with slit necks. I counted dandruff flecks flocked in a woman’s hair. But then my mother stepped on stage, rolled up her wide sleeves, her headpiece shook, her voice blistered and flared. Her head turned to me with a noble crack—the loss of her daughter to land demanded nothing less.

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Morning Porridge Before the pork buns steamed in the pot, moisture in their white folds, before the dried tofu was trimmed into thin strips, my father raked long-grain rice out of the mesh bag, poured a bowl of porridge, spread dried pork shreds and salted peanuts into a heap on top. Each morning my grandmother listened for steam rising up the stairs. She reclined on her bed with the blue hydrangea pattern I wanted. I handed her the tray, glanced at the expanding brown mass on her face. Day after day, my father told me not to wear white in my hair, not to leave chopsticks vertical in a bowl of rice. I did it anyway. One by one, I stole the raisins from the box on her bedside table.

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At Lake Michigan The snow rattles with each step, the sound of chestnuts cracking,

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my breath glacial, growing into webbed chalk. Occasionally snow bundles land with a dampened crunch and crimp. Houses plume smoke from chimneys like tied kites, not allowed to scythe the wind and rise through the pewter sheath, beyond snow-globe harbors. The mailbox handle molts its hold. Letters from other places, bent and brailled. But I already know their contents. I want to taste the bindings of foreign books and to ride the canals with the Queen of Cyprus. Half of my footprints left on the driveway, a new floor of flakes as thin as a crepe. The wind begins to answer with city: woven streets weaving down to narrow alleys, crowing oil, bending yolks, metronome of canopies cranking, the sound of Bus 71 hoeing into the asphalt—I should look away, but I won’t.

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There Is Something about the East Coast Perhaps it is the finish in mahogany or the tufted leather and embroidered bedding, refuge on frosty autumn apple-picking evenings. The sage glow from the banker’s lamp or the ironwork on the bronze chandelier above, glow recessed on a home library with scents of old. The honey pine table with its distressed surface, beveled top and smoothly-turned legs, the center of generations—a family heirloom. Or the pattern on the English-fabric rugs, its floral curves twisting in continuum, mimicking the pageantry of family genealogies. The vase in high-fired earthenware, with its Russet rosebuds trimmed fresh from the garden, where grandchildren play in the Bedouin patterns of green. Or the tulip stemware, used when equally dashing guests arrive in the evening and tell elegant hand-loomed adventures. There is something about the East Coast— a hot cranberry toddy scented with sticks of cinnamon, always steaming, always burning my tongue.

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Golden Valley The stench of radish choked the kitchen. Two men appeared at the front door, one man asked my father if he could light a cigar. My father nodded, but he hated smoke. The other man spelled out English words— freeway, water tower, development. They showed slides of single-story ranches, never to be built, hugged by palm trees never to be planted. No money down and a ten-year financing plan. Our new neighbors stayed inside, their screen door hung on one hinge. Kangaroo rats learn how to manufacture their own water from digesting seeds— mesquite, creosote bush, purslane, grama grass. They won’t even drink water in captivity. I’ll never understand such visible change, our time so finite, mere crumbs of globe. My father knelt on the ground, washing his hands with dirt.

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First Halloween You have such beautiful hands, a stranger on a bus said. Slender long sinew, veins and porcelain, knuckles round as moons. They are my father’s hands, like a nobleman’s in autumn, oyster in their smooth, helium in their rise. Mine bloomed with license to think, his mopped floors, mixed mahjong tiles. In the evenings, chipped tiles slapped, bracked, bumped. Outside, children split streets like an avalanche. My father splayed under the table, curtains drawn, eyeballs swelled to moons. I remember the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory— we both win if we cooperate. But say I want to be ornate, a well-dressed disaster. Say he prefers khakis and a pressed shirt. Say I am the cock that fiercely fights until the end. Say he is the turtle tucked under its bud, shameful to flower. None of this matters—my hands, sleek and doomed under a sky, pinned to some continent.

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Majority Rules After returning from Arkansas, I’ve never been the same. Little here, little there, it’s always great to go à la carte—it gives leverage and leave, it lends option to pull out that front tooth or start saying y’all. I begin to acknowledge feet with hair on the big toes, my eyes get greener and green. Periodically, there’s a 300-point inspection and I’m checked, re-checked, and checked again, but what if the checker is the one missing a tooth? What if I discover this when I’m more than halfway? Do I turn back or keep going away from home— two small dots plucking broken guitars? But when all those cheering me on have the same green eyes, blow me kisses, toast me with identical chalices, tell me that the roof is really a door, how can I not keep going, to find out whether all along I’ve been following the right average or whether my father is really rising from the ocean with a sack of starfish.

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Mostly Ocean I have tried to reach land, over and over, holding onto crags for map, but packs of hounds chew their tongues off, lined up like a row of soldiers, waiting for my first step onto rocks that bank like forks. I am hardened by this living everywhere. At last, one day I make it onto beach. When I am inspected, they discover a likeness of lost, barnacles of want. I ask: What is likeness but a desire to build an empire? I barely make it through. As I look back at the sea, I know my body will always be mostly ocean, a disease stitched into me.

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Dragon Inn Each night we longed for the last guests to leave—the stubborn leftovers who gazed, glazed at us, as if we weren’t there, weren’t sitting around the table in our “allegiance.” It’s feeding time in a room with red lanterns layered with golden calligraphy. The cook spun the susan, judged the lobster, integer by integer, sucked the elegy out of its claw. A plate of capsized mussels, in a metropolis of thick, bubbled, eyed us as if we were alive. The cook’s wife hyphenated our air. She told us, your Chinese not so good. She sent eggplant onto our plates. Marry a doctor, she said. The pacific booth in the back corner pulled me, drawn and drowning into the gut of Taiwan. There, we snipped ends off Kentucky wonder beans, stuffed fortune cookies in wax paper bags.

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The guts of that kitchen gated me, but I still testified for its efficacy, wandering my own blood vessels. I was diligent, obedient, and shy— compatible with the dragon—now I am province, ten thousand acres away, searching through the rubble for that one bridge back not made of dust.

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part three limits The life of a man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end.

—r a l p h wa l d o e m e r s o n

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Lantern Festival

In December 1937, the Japanese army invaded the Chinese city Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were raped, tortured, and murdered.

Some open like accordions, honoring the arrival of a newborn, others hang still like moons, red ones line up in a row on a metal thread over scents of sticky rice balls smoking in soup, round ones glow in the wind, sockets firing up one after another. No! I am wrong, the round ones lash in the wind: they are human heads, gutted and plucked from bodies that were snipping stalks of choy sum, or excavating daikon, or stabbing fish in the river, or trimming pork loins for evening porridge. And they hang in a row for decoration, foreheads bumping into each other, glowing like a galaxy of holiday lights, honoring the arrival of the new, that always, always turns into the next target, the minute it is named.

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Flight

Chung Mong-Hun was a Hyundai heir and executive who jumped from the 12th floor of the Hyundai building after he was caught illegally transferring $500 million to North Korea to secure an inter-Korean summit.

You hate the body because it can be broken. House a pump in four chambers and it will run but it won’t last from the 12th floor down. At first the heart is just a tube, like a fish’s heart. Later we make it pretty like a valentine, to mask its true ugliness— honeycombs of mucus and membrane, chordae tendinae. The impact is what breaks it, this thing that wasn’t meant to break, suddenly a heap of dung on the greenbelt, and now they lie everywhere— on lawns, on sidewalks, in waters. You love the body because it can be broken, gun to mouth, razor across wrist, hypodermic with insulin, off a bridge, a building, car on railroad tracks, toaster in tub, just ignite the engine and breathe, make sure it’s at least twelve stories and the ground is paved. They say if you take drugs, quit. If you smoke, quit. If you embezzle, quit. He left his glasses and watch on his desk. Take your last flight with a crane who must fly over the Himalayas. Birds live in a rush, they breathe faster,

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heart beats faster, body temperature is higher. Birds have a backbone. Birds die faster. Have you ever seen a gull riding a trade wind? Or a gooney bird land? It starts falling and crash lands on its nose. We can’t do what the bird does naturally. Something in us is always trying.

Line 1 is from “Animal Farm, Song of the Colonel Governor-General” by Suji Kwock Kim, Notes from the Divided Country.

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The Tower of London The ditch, the moat, the wharf, the turrets, the bastion, flocked by the ravens—Hardey, Thor, Odin, Gwyllum, Cerdric, Hugin, Murin, who ate from the Tower’s hand, who watched Jane in her gilded jaw circulate like a virus through narrow alleys, dingy, leprosy, plague, pox, where men only ventured in twos and threes with torches and short blades. Treason, adultery, incest, witchcraft. And Jane in her gemmed neck, nesting in the Tower, its stone floor pulsing like voltage. At ten in the morning, she watched from the window as her husband’s skull grazed against grout, rolling along the flagstone. Then the yakking yakking of the crowds to watch her untucking. She gave her gloves and handkerchief to her lady-in-waiting, removed her headdress and neckerchief, placed her head on the block. The barracks. The alliances. The stain. You cannot stop. We cannot stop pulling at the mast until the last sky falls. Hotel blast, car bomb, ground war, our will, their skull, grenades scooping cities, then gridding cities again, our better or butcher, pestle of powder, shovel, gun, the heads are still leaking out of us, rolling down the river like floating buckets bobbing in brilliance.

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Seven Changs At night your growth rate doubles and each morning I spot yet another Chang in the newspaper, staring at me with its dull lamps. I limp up a mountainside towards a growing opal. Oracle, is this the way up to the little office with orange lights? Let’s not argue this time. For the last time, we argued over the arrival of another Victoria Chang. Changed from Valerie to Victoria and now my ruin, for she, a track star, runs faster than a seashore. Shared bunks were never favored by me, a has-been-girl or even worse, a not-yet-girl. And don’t even mention the others— faces smashed against the door, Helen Chang, Heather Chang, Hilary Chang. And with each new Chang, the shock of the world goes down, drawn to the next eyeless eel or the one-legged constellation. The next seven Victoria Changs, all victorious, in rows, each a little taller than the last. Their fevered footsteps persist, fist me into midnights.

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Planting Tulips They bend into each other’s stamens, tendrils leaning, sucking and bulging, calyx swaying in blade, lamina, burning under a trusted sun. Cottage Tulips, Single Earlies, Double Earlies, Darwins, Parrots. Plant them in the fall to see their torsos rise in spring. Their butter, their purple, their blood. In Holland, they bloom everywhere, behind colonials, across pools of wheat, near prints of wolves— in 1635, for one bulb, a seller received two loads of wheat, four oxen, eight pigs, twelve sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four barrels of beer, two barrels of butter, one thousand pounds of cheese, a suit of clothes, and a bed. The bed in the Orange County model home looks out the window onto fields of cabbage, radish, chrysanthemums. The bodiless meadow populates with brick and beam. They’re already all sold out, grabbing light through mulch and bulge, the casita option, loft option, granite option. We could barely get through the door. If you plant the bulbs before the winter begins, they will be the first to bloom in your neighborhood. Pick Single Earlies or Double Earlies and the bulbs will burst open like drunk parachutes. They tend to live only a year. Sometimes if you plant the bulbs deeper, they might bloom longer. But mostly they die each year. They forget how to turn away from shade.

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Instinct

In 2002, Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad killed ten people and wounded three in sniper attacks surrounding Washington, D.C.

Because they are aware somehow, and cannot flee from their knowledge, the pair of ducks waits by the pool until I am done swimming, the female mottled in buffy-brown, squatting at the pool’s edge, the male upright, metallic green head like a tower. They enter one orange foot at a time when they hear the click of the gate, signaling my exit. Where did they learn this distance? Did they witness duck decoys, men camouflaged in marshy pot holes, the flight of a damaged mallard? Or is it instinct, the way we stop at a lion’s mane or a grizzly’s upright bellow? The snipers folded down the back seat, access to the trunk for a gunport and a rifle. They practiced aiming, breath control, did drills on shapes and shooter cards. They waved to neighbors, mowed their lawn, purchased donuts at the Circle K, said pardon and no thank you. What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, even their own?

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Damage

Frank Quattrone was a managing director at an investment bank. He was charged with witness tampering and obstruction of justice for ordering his employees to destroy documents to thwart an investigation.

I remember his moustache and how it carried the remnants of his Smith & Wollensky’s veal chop. He wore dark blue suits and Armani ties with the little orange fish that swam when he gave presentations, numbers ballooning, barely holding onto the pages, winning him billions and an elegy during life. That was a time of airless, of endless, of limousines who could name us by face and the sweet hum of their engines as quiet and constant as a bee swarm. Honesty only an afterimage, trailing the Concorde and caviar in first class. At the same time, my amazement—that I too could be lulled into dying. Why does

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everything have to happen once before we can say we would never do it? What happens when the beginning of his story is no longer told?

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Gamble House We toured your rooms of ton and beam, of ram, of mortiseand-tenon, of ten thousand. Your pegs swollen from holding wood, the opal of your lights like minced stars, your panels in the great room pronounced their thunder each night while the Gambles read by light or watched your fires retire. Some mornings the oven smoked with the eddy of breads, braiding up the stairs, wafting under Persian rugs. But what business did we have here— of gambled to greatness, of black to blaze, of scrap to starling? What business did we have preserving this maze of chambers into a landmark, while bombing another into a footprint?

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Human Inventory And what of human inventory? Suppose there’s some catalog in the basement of the New York library. Slip and trip, over the keeper of some record of our double helix, meant to fix our borderlessness. And have you seen it? It contains the lipids of your life, a virtual blueprint—the lint of your look at the nearly breasted 13-year-old girl, the mold under your son’s fingernails, the fall of your first marriage. Scrolling over your arms and legs—you quit the trombone; you are tone deaf, correct? You cheated in chess; you questioned the use of a slide rule. Someone saw you. And in wide sweeps, you move up and down the rungs of the DNA ladder, the win, the whittling—hoping ultimately that your missteps will not matter. yes, you do hear things—that’s the ticking of the tab— and the consequences will rage in your child’s sea.

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Limits The brown-headed cowbird sleuths like a witch between oaks, drops its eggs into the nests of other species. Its larger chick hatches earlier, lifts its beak for the edge of beetles, legs of cicada, mantids, mayflies. Its black body bulges like a sunset, pushing other chicks to the ground, thumps mistaken for ripe acorns. If f(x)=x2, then the limit and the heart, clear and finite. But what if f(x)=1/x-3 and x=3? Then the heart never stops wanting, spinning into infinity. Let x be a moon in Andromeda’s spiral, let a Chinese peasant shoot for its nucleus, let him stretch the bow and arrow, turn his lingering hurt into meat, that is, until he aims directly at your heart.

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Animal Models The lab smelled like dung, apple pie, whatever just drifted by, near rows of colonials, wayward gardens. Hundreds of pigs shrilled and clucked as they studied drops of rain. One covered a gurney, her snout steamed as if she were sunning on a summer lawn. Doctors induced stenosis, filling her arteries with grit and pith, narrowing the tube down to dot. They stuck in a stent, weaving a catheter through her like a subway, waiting to see if her body would patch itself. They poked at parts, as butchers prepare meat, shearing off mucosa and tissue, digging out the beating ruby. They injected her with pentobarbital, removed the lung, trachea, esophagus up to the glottis for examining. They rinsed the rags, wheeled her shell away into a closet, then plucked another from the pen, continuing their outward hunt for increment, shouting beyond the sea, but their voices always came back to them, more bitter, ash-tinged.

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Taiwan Independence One knitted pillars of steel and concrete to cast the tallest shadow in the world. Another argued that when she shook her sheets at night, they smelled of plum blossoms from the T’ang dynasty. One made a signaturechop out of stone, carving a curved line into a new shape, a new country. Another hauled black granite, polished the front into a mirror—a headless ceremonial robe looked back. One took a truck over her legs three times for protesting. Another sat on water’s edge on the Taiwan Strait, reading Songs of Chu, a hundred missiles pointed at his chest. In the evenings, each went home, stitched their bowls into collages of rice, radish, and pork.

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Grooming

In 2004, four American contract workers were killed, mutilated, and hung from a bridge in Iraq.

The woman at the Orange County Airport picked at the man’s shirt and its overgrown dust. She took pieces off with such patience, holding each up like a prized gift. When she finished, the man picked loose hair off her sweater as if selecting figs for a deserving bowl or zucchini bread. On TV, the bodies hung like wash in a wooded yard. I kept thinking the sun would eventually hit their crispness and they could be worn. But the bodies were bodies, charred and weathered. The men chanted through their throats some alphabet. And when I came back to the woman, the man, and the airport, we all had the faces of operatic masks, we picked and picked parasites and salt crystals with our clumsy fingers, as if we cared, hundreds and hundreds of us, arms raised, toothy white grins.

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Face I know you must think that I am the only thing that belongs solely to you and when you die, I will disappear with you—my skin, muscle, nerves, vessels, galloping to keep up with your last breath, for I am slower to go, like cells of muscle and bone. But there is no need to worry about me. You cannot know how wrong you are. Look around in the streets— a girl’s nose mimics mine, and a young boy’s lips also frown like a severed stalk, thirsty for sun. Long after you die, I will still live everywhere, erupting from the soil each year, part here, part there, and my grin will ever last somewhere in someone.

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Meditation at Petoskey An old woman on the beach hands me a stone. I tell her of the ruining landscape, tortoise backs of stone, algae colonies, like puzzles on rock, the lighthouse column with its cracked putty and rotating eye. But she says, nothing has changed, we have always been this way—a thousand young larks mount the sudden breeze.

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Other Books in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Muse Susan Aizenberg

Winter Amnesties Elton Glaser

This Country of Mothers Julianna Baggott

Fabulae Joy Katz

White Summer Joelle Biele

Train to Agra Vandana Khanna

In Search of the Great Dead Richard Cecil

American Flamingo Greg Pape

Twenty First Century Blues Richard Cecil

Crossroads and Unholy Water Marilene Phipps

Consolation Miracle Chad Davidson

Birthmark Jon Pineda

Names above Houses Oliver de la Paz

Year of the Snake Lee Ann Roripaugh

The Star-Spangled Banner Denise Duhamel

Misery Prefigured J. Allyn Rosser

Beautiful Trouble Amy Fleury

Becoming Ebony Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

Pelican Tracks Elton Glaser

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poetry “Emerson claims in his essay ‘Circles’ that ‘the past is always swallowed and forgotten.’ But Victoria Chang, in her superb first book interrogates what Emerson would erase: the tyranny of Maoist China, her Asian American family, her experience in high finance, and so much more. Nothing’s too large or small for this alchemical poet, from a KitchenAid mixer to Eva Braun to the most serene rendering of an oceanside landscape. Her technical skills are flexible and powerful, her voice is fearless yet capable of great lyrical tenderness, and her vision—global, principled, sympathetic—is a gift to contemporary poetry in America during a needful time.”—David Baker, author of Changeable Thunder “ ‘A thirst for the self / in everything—even / in the sweet chinks of mandarin. . . . ’ This does not sound like a first book, does it? With astringent understatement and wry economy, with nuance and intelligence and an enviable command of syntax and poetic line, Victoria Chang dissects the venerable practices of cultural piety and self-regard. She is a master of the thumbnail narrative. She can wield a dark eroticism. She is determined to tackle subject matter that is not readily subdued to the proportions of lyric. Her talent is conspicuous, and this book a most impressive debut.”—Linda Gregerson, author of Waterborne

todd terlecki

“Victoria Chang’s Circle denotes a geometry of enclosure that brings into itself all the fractious identities of contemporary American life. The lives of women, immigrants, artful self-making—all these are investigated and sung into newness by her canny poems. Time and again the astringency of her lines arrives at a clarifying lyricism, restoring a complex mystery to the everyday. This is a book of powerful, empowered poems, from a poet we are now very privileged to hear from.”—Rick Barot, author of The Darker Fall Victoria Chang’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, Virginia

Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry, and she is the editor of the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. She has earned degrees from the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Stanford University and is the recipient of a Bread Loaf scholarship, a Kenyon Writer’s Workshop Taylor Fellowship, the Hopwood Award, and the Holden Minority Fellowship from the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Crab Orchard Series in Poetry 

Open Competition Award

Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Erin Kirk New Cover photograph: “Elliptical Light Effect” by Lawrence Lawry. Getty Images.

Southern Illinois University Press p.o. box 3697  carbondale, il 62902-3697 www.siu.edu/~siupress

ISBN 0-8093-2618-3

9000 0

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