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  • The Diabetic Father: His Journey
  • Tina Chang (bio)

1.

He is a stack of newspapers. He is a kettle. He is a plate left out to dry. The second wife tells him to find work today.

He scans the classifieds, losing himself in the alphabet, falls asleep between the letters, black print staining his eyes.

2.

His mother wore paper roses in her wig. Winter. In the kitchen, mice ate their way though air

to reach a nest of bananas. There was nothing to do but let them go.

She told him to talk to no one. He talked to no one. Once he reached the roof he sat and read a Cantonese mystery.

The city was rotting beneath him. The children ran down the street beating his windows with sticks.

3.

They called his father King of Burned Pots as he stood before columns of dishes in the back of the restaurant, [End Page 603] his arms immersed in brown water: pork grease and mussel shells. Hidden behind a veil of white steam he was washing, always washing. And his son imagined wings sprouting from the dishwasher’s tired shoulders.

4.

His head is under the sink, fixing a leak. Tapwater slides across his wrist:

chicken fat, hair, water. The wrench falls out of his hand.

The disease has taken him not by the throat but the hands.

5.

Could there be anything better than transforming yourself into a boat or a komodo dragon, forgetting your sickness

and gorging yourself on a bowl of ice cream and the hundred cashews you adore?

The room smells of alcohol, Tiger Balm, dried rags. You are sick in the knees.

You have a cup of rice and a prune in water for breakfast.

Unemployment has you cooking broad beans, overwatering the rhododendrens, flapping your slippers on the basement steps. [End Page 604]

Lord, no one is listening to me. The grocer changes beef prices every day. You remember sweet grass and weeping trees.

6.

Your sons are tapping on your door in a dream. Your second wife comes out to dress you in fine trousers.

You are laughing in front of a long table of turkey and apples. When you wake, the house is vacant.

7.

Right now, in the jelly of his plasma, the sugar is taking effect.

It is burning him up, raising the smoke of him to the god

he wishes he could be. All over his body, an atlas of wounds.

His feet are boulders, his mouth a streetcorner, a reservoir.

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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