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  • Humility
  • Tina Chang (bio)

During the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, Washington Roebling, the bridge’s creator, contracted caissons disease or what is known as “the bends.” As a result, he was paralyzed.

The moment Roebling opened his eyes in the vast sea, fish crowded him to a shock of ripples, water crushed

the spine to a pill box. Workers on land reeled him in and jerked him out of his sleep.

My mother delves her arms into a sinkful of water. Years float in wet rings around her.

There is a mapping of her back, an imperfect arched line. Random possibilities etched into this woman.

Roebling knew it. The body is a malleable thing, made to kneel and curl into a knot.

God cracks his finger over the side of a life and it becomes a tilted cup.

As I grew, another child was born. We, as two, ate her food and scuffed the floor We shed ourselves in heaps of soiled clothes. I threw saucers and disappointed daisies

so she could bend. I grew into the shape of a daughter

and she grew into the shape of a widow which looked more and more like a hook, or a whittled cane.

I have many versions of her life. In every one I call her mother. In one story, she stands by the front door [End Page 601]

listening to drunken boys break lamplights with bricks She watches them abandon their homes

as they chug whiskey from a bottle. She imagines she is one of them. Her back straightens

for some grand occasion of leaping out of her skin. She leaves her children. Footsteps like waves lapping.

But this is not true. Mother stayed. She attempted to capture her reflection with a wilted ladle.

She whispers, “I wish, I want,” while she looks south to admire a neighbor’s well-lit garden.

When Roebling was lifted out of the East River, for an instant, it might have seemed good to breathe in

water, for the eyes to flutter in flight, to swallow the clatter of the sun.

In all the rooms of our house, my mother bends to drink a sea with her dress.

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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