Untitled #10, 2002
Victoria Chang

What happens if these aren’t pastoral or war poems? When I can feel
the light I carry on my back but can’t see it or use it?
When sadness and language cast the same shadow. These six strips are
the shadows of our blood, proving that every woman’s life can
be broken into and displayed. On some nights, if I zoom in to the
painting, they become three sets of lips. If I hold my phone near
my mouth, I can feel three people breathing on my face. I made an
effort to unlove everyone, but all I received were these lips, slightly
open. Today my eighty-year-old neighbor told me, Everything
hurts…you’ll see. I wanted to tell him that I already see. After a
death, the idea of a journey disappears. After two deaths, the journey
doubles. Maybe our bodies never had a vanishing point,
so there will always be hunger. Even a woman’s life is trying to
become more than the woman it represents.