ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Kristin Chang lives in NY. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Hyphen, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, Muzzle, and elsewhere. She works for Winter Tangerine and has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook Past Lives, Future Bodies is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in October 2018.
Nomenclature
A group of vultures is a venue. A group of bats
is a colony. Mosquitoes are called
a scourge & my blood is in season.
I ripen for a mouth. I comb
my hair quiet, finger my veins
til they surface like worms
after a rain. A group of oysters
is a bed & seabirds
a wreck. Once, I watched a seagull
cracking clams against a rock, the white
dead meat that pearled in its throat.
I counted every bird carrying the sky
into night. At night, my mother spits
blood in her sleep. I listen in
on her dreams: the water solid
with bodies, the lake littered
with limbs. Puppies are called litters.
Once, my mother stole her neighbor's
dog & ate it raw. Once, my mother
stole her neighbor's god & buried it
so it could never find her.
One summer, we found my mother
sitting naked in a park, a squirrel
strangled in each hand. Something
about a name is violent. A group of foxes
is a troop & sometimes a skulk. My mother
skulks into our rooms at night, names us
in a language we traded
like baby teeth for coins
with men's faces. We lick
the coins like candy, rust our tongues
away. My mother's mouth rusted open.
Plugged with dirt & fists. Her skirt torn
away like a scab. Sometimes a name is both
a thing & what it does.
A group of larks
is a family & also
an ascension.
A group of men
is a military
& also a rape.
"Nomenclature" was birthed out of thinking about the violence of taxonomy and categorization. I was thinking about all the times white people have asked me things like, Why do Asians always hang out with other Asians? and the way that groups of white people are almost never assigned a vocabulary of threat. Meanwhile, the nomenclature of immigration has historically constructed/legalized our bodies as a sinister or skulking "Yellow Peril." I was interested in seeing what kind of friction/electricity could be produced when the most intimate of collectives — the family and its mythologies — grinds up against the violent vocabulary of the state.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
