Love is Scripted (live)
Tina Chang reading “Love is Scripted” live at Bowdoin College, November 15, 2007.
Tina Chang
A Full Life (live)
Tina Chang reading “A Full Life” live at Bowdoin College, November 15, 2007.
Origin & Ash
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 […]
Invention
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 […]
Servitude
Li Sau and Li Jie [Hunan, 1938] She takes one breast out of her silken undershirt like a secret, a warm brown egg and places it into his open mouth. His body is hammocked in floral cloth, tied to her bosom. August sweats at the base of her neck. She gives […]
Hearsay
[Hunan, 1943] So little wind to go around. The whole family sleeps on bamboo mats. Their eyelids yield, flicker shut like broken light bulbs. Mosquitoes burn a hole in your skin to take blood. There are no clocks to tell the time. And tell me the part that I hope is not […]
The Burning
“…I’ve lived without names…” -Stephen Kuusisto Off a seashore in Russia I run, laughing at the mystery of movement in the form of water, laughing at my father with sand on his face who will one day die. Or imagine for a minute a locomotive full of people, rocking with […]
Letter to a Stranger
After Thomas James Dear Father, I drifted on the bouquet of your red tongue for two years. It was a kingdom, the stadium of your face. I took sweets from a sealed jar when mother wasn’t looking. I grew up on the back steps of St. Mary’s where I learned to scream at kitten boys […]