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  • Creation
  • Tina Chang (bio)

I begin with the backstroke, flailing toward the island I remember as a child, far from my father’s slit arms, farther

from my mother’s screams. On the 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 cracked their faces on rocks, clouds are collapsing

onto tiny houses. And just now a monsoon has begun. It reminds me of a story my father told me: He once made the earth not in seven days

but in one. His steely joints wielded lava and water and mercy in great ionic perfection. He began the world, hammering the length

of trees, trees like a war of families, trees which fumbled for grand gesture. The world began in an explosion of fever and rain.

He said, Tina, your body came out floating. I was born in the middle of monsoon season, palm trees tearing the tin roofs.

Now as I wander to the center of the island no one will speak to me. My dialect left somewhere in his pocket, in a nursery book, [End Page 597]

a language of childsplay. Now everything is unfurling in pictures: soil is washed from the soles of feet, a woman runs toward her weeping son, chicken bones float

in a pot full of dirty water. And I keep returning to the animal on the road. When I stooped to look at it

It smelled of trash, rotting vegetation, the pitiful tongue. Its claws were curled tight to its heart; eyes open eyes open.

Why was it that when the world began in the small factory of my father’s imagination he never spoke of this gnarled concoction

of bone and blood that is nothing like wonder but just the opposite, something simply ravaged. He too would die soon after

the making of the world. I would go on coaxed by gravity and hard science. I would go on

waking, sexing, mimicking enemies while he rested in the beautiful satin of shriveled skin, eyes swollen to exquisite planets.

Tina Chang

Tina Chang received her MFA degree in poetry from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including The Asian Pacific American Journal, The Cream City Review, Tamaqua, and Blue Ink Press. She has won awards for her poetry, among them the Allen Ginsberg Award and the University and College Prize from the Academy of American Poets.

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