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  • Letter to a Stranger
  • Tina Chang (bio)

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 that didn’t do what I said. We took the body and the blood in time. It is possible to be divine in one afternoon.

A girl kneels on a mound of pebbles to feel the roughness that will change her destiny.

  When you died, Vincent started his fascination with glass: its world of definites. Cut or uncut. Severed or whole. It is 1997 and all our failures are tangible. Vincent is 28 and carries a pistol wrapped in a powder-blue handkerchief. He will use it on the clocks, the countenance of apples, the delicate house of some girl’s throat still dripping with wine.

Let me sleep now, in the shelter, in the halt. Stop.

  At your burial, I dropped carnations into the big earth. Mother pulled me along by the sleeve. As I walked I watched winter trees prick the palms of each passing cloud. It was that dance I watched as I said goodbye to you. Now there is the sound of great thunder as the brothers come running through the house, their boots cracking the surface of things, fuck you’s dropping from their fat lips.

One organ persists alone. Three notes repeating and repeating. [End Page 599]

  I am governed by terror, sleeplessness, nostalgia. Mother of God helps me out with my daily chores. I capture heat in a rusted pot, smooth the bedsheets with a hammer, take up the hours with my veined hands. Father, there are magnificent shadows engraving themselves onto the dinner table. I keep thinking you are telling me to go. Let me sleep and dream of the falling architecture of this house, let the light transform it into an imitation of heaven. My eyes are closed, two razors.

Dear Father, What kind of music is coming from me? What kind?

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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