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  • Ascension
  • Tina Chang (bio)

After checking his pockets for nickels and dimes, she rubbed wet cloth upon cloth until the dirt drifted like a gray spill

of floating cells, faintly alive, bubbling up for her pruned fingers to touch. That same year I was baptized. I drank Holy water from a marble dish,

licked the droplets off my fingers. Then I took the wafer in my mouth, letting it shrivel before landing in my stomach like a divine bullet.

She took his rosary beads from a hook by the mirror and placed it inside the dresser among pushpins, unworn scarves, tubes of chalky lipstick.

She had stopped saying her prayers. After morning mass, she’d wait for me across the street. Nights. She locked the door to the washroom, holding herself steady over a sink.

Her tears dripped into the rust-caked valves. Mother washed him well when he died. She cleaned the places that one could easily forget: the backs of his knees, his chaffed heels,

the soft spaces between his legs. She even scoured the inside of his mouth with a child’s toothbrush. By then his body had gone completely to bone. [End Page 606]

I think of the Christ I saw in watercolors in Catechism books all the Sundays of my life. How I studied His body, the way it shined when He was removed from a tilted cross.

Even as He lay twisted and naked, His spine spiraling to the mud there was a cluster of red winged angels reaching toward Him from the ledge of a cloud and how Mary, His mother

clung to the mortal shell, her lips sinking into His collar bone, fingers tightening around the blue face as His soul stormed over the ladder of His ribs.

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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