Dear P., XIV

Victoria Chang

First published in Salt Hill 27 (2011).

There are wars and rice paddies that take
children up to their necks. I am no longer
illumined by their cries. It’s your white
eyes in the night that lamp me. Your body
is my brain. You control my heart rate,
blood pressure, temperature. Your billions
of neurons unravel across the earth and catch
the hummingbird I used to write about. If
you could put it in your mouth, you would.
You would delight in its shaking wings and
the violence of its ice-pick nose. If I could
put your head into my mouth, I would.
I would roll the marble around and around,
like a jawbreaker, until you dissolve into me.

Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020), Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon, 2017), The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005). Her children’s books include Is Mommy? (Simon & Schuster, 2015), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Love, Love (Sterling, 2020), a middle grade novel. She lives in Los Angeles. This and two more of Chang’s “Dear P.” poems were published in Issue 27, along with a mini-interview.