I have truths I have yet to claim

Angela Veronica Wong

LIFE AS A GIRL

*

the written boundaries. the blue lines. my body grid into streets. skin against wetness.
wetness against air. movement; resistance. a red dream. a read dream. a clothesline.
scission.

*

the ocean is on the bottom/ of everything. like being/ in an echo—without language, with
only/ the interruption of the body/ in space.

*

i can see from here what is left— your rhythms opened.

*

fuck me like cleaning
a pumpkin plunging a hand
into cold, wet, pulling
out a fistful of slippery seeds,
clumps of tangled
hair, a tumor leaking
between fingers

*

This body brought to surface—
I was
a girl at her first bleed, thinking
there it is, there it is, I thought
it would never come. This
bald thing, this
clenched muscle, smooth
and still like silk, like
a forgotten lunch, it is
heavy with lost purpose.

*

and

still

caught

in the net

*

i have truths i have yet to claim:

*

there is no such thing as one-way action like:

i read you. stop.

you fuck me. stop.

*

geometry is divisive. lines, angles, bisection. parallel and // paralyzed.

divisive is strangely pleasing to the eye, a futile // symmetry.

triplets // in 4/4 time.

*

Sometimes I forget I share
language.

You use
the same words
I use.

But not these:

*

monsters the sea creates

*

to desire is to live, if only a little, in the possession of an object.

*

maybe we were never meant
to raise to the surface that
which lives in the depths—

*

to have/ is to lose/ the grammar/ of

*

in freedom—fluorescent in their
self-illumination, gargantuan and
strange-skinned they are
unquantifiable

*

landscape and borders oceans open in deserts

skin, bones, blood distinguish pronouns

from other pronouns

*

may/be an/echo/ as zero/ as language completed

*

Fold me in the direction of origami arrows.

Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry
Issue 1 | June 2010 | pp 5-14