Each night. Two crickets appear in my room. I stamp a magazine on them, wait for their bodies to dry. But by morning they are gone. By morning I am on The Lot in Hollywood and there are stars everywhere. The leaves look like little bodies falling off a bridge. Clint Eastwood’s waving his arms. Everyone holds their breath. Barnyard animals line up in trailers behind me. One squawks through a small window. I’m suddenly aware of my shoes that look like plastic. Everyone here is always looking. But they look past me. Clint is waving his arms again. It is noon and people come out of buildings with kisses. They hunger. There’s a rape, of course, and good hair, and a manhole with a tunnel, a dead girl with her eyes still open. Jayne Mansfield’s daughter plays a cop. The wind doesn’t knock her over—asks her what route to take. My heart pounds so hard it stabs me to death. People everywhere, bottles, red for her cheeks, combs, powder, hairspray, meat sandwich, everything touching some part of her. A part of that face, apocalyptic hair. My pendulum swings from lust to lust. For what remains—the concrete once the shadow has gone, the ocean after the bodies have been pulled out, the girl’s keychain in a tunnel. My plastic shoes covered with yellow leaves.

O my lost big-horned sheep, my gangly elk, morning here rises out of ocean and white sprigs. A new world: Los Angeles with exits and angers, here people leave with jeans cut off. Live against dwindle and darkling. It’s Sunday and I wander a book fair in Hollywood, into the wind. While much of the city auditions. And last night [____] scolded my sister on the promenade. We had banana crepes with nutella afterwards. He drank coffee and crossed his legs, as if to say, body, I cannot uncross, I am star-throated. Once we played cards and drowned under coats at other people’s houses. We swallowed water, came up soaked, singing. What long sighs, what unwavering frowns now. And her boyfriend, on a balcony looking down at his hands, one a slip knot, the other, a hook. She once said, but he looks Vietnamese. Now she dresses up for dinner each night, though dinner is abandoned supermarket cake and day-old meat. Happy Birthday Jimmy. O how I need trees. I need hills. I need elk and somewhere in a house, a yellow bedroom with bees flying and a girl reading Agatha Christie. I need a freeway where people aren’t yelling move up, move up, move up.

We buried Uncle Li under a hunter’s moon.
How many days

I had faced him during our Moon Guitar lessons,
his cigarette gnarled

and limp, hanging from his crooked teeth,
black-rimmed glasses

halfway down his face. How many days
my slow fingers mimicked

his enchanted. But why do I now only notice
the many days she interrupted

our lessons, arriving without her husband,
the gold-molared man—

after that, Uncle Li’s kitchen always smelled
of gently braised bok choy

and beef as fragrant as lavender. Why do I only
now notice the longing

in their looks, the smell of sex, two burning cigarettes
in the tray, two pulled-out chairs,

a wound on her arm like a red jewel, the year
she never came back.

Kitchen candle, shore, fresh,
giant mist, come in your handfuls,
your soothing scents, your small
canisters, through the accordion mirror,
past the ax that may have swung,
the professor shoveling his driveway,
past the young girl who may have
shared his toothbrush just once,
under a nickel or brass or bronze moon,
or just twice under a convex mirror—
did they or not? Answer me. Someone.
I just want to know, to near, to be
shown, there—a place where sinuous-
steel springs mean just that, where
there are no fabric options, just yes,
I cheated on that problem set. You are
a problem set over me, under me,
on me, because there are at least two
of you, sometimes seventy-two million
of you. One: bone-smooth, two:
elliptically green, three: arsenic-laced,
four: my head down a sink, rippling,
digging, leaving my thumbprints on
anything not gray. Stop putting your
hands on me. Make me taste salt or light.

© Victoria Chang 2007

Victoria Chang’s book of poetry, Circle, won the Crab Orchard Open Competition (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). She is the editor of an anthology: Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004). Her poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2005, The Nation, Poetry, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and others.  She resides in Southern California and is completing a Ph.D. in USC’s literature and creative writing program.

© MiPOesias Magazine 2000-2007~. A Menendez/King Publication ~