Kristin Chang | Climbing Xiangshan | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Kristin Chang lives in NY. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Hyphen, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, Muzzle, and elsewhere. She works for Winter Tangerine and has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook Past Lives, Future Bodies is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in October 2018.

Kristin Chang's Website.

Also by Kristin Chang: Two Poems Yilan Two Poems

Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: Nomenclature

June 2018

Kristin Chang

Climbing Xiangshan

elephant mountain All day we search for elephants, find only a half-buried dog with both eyes bitten out. We are heat-clumsy, limbs of sun snatching the wet from our mouths. You are sweat-gemmed skin & I am thirst-scraped tongue. We labor into moist jungle, clots of rain I mistake for blood beating the same rhythm into both of us. As if our hearts hang from the same rib, as if rain is a verb our mouths catch & conjugate into storm. Rain ripping the fur off every animal. By morning, I am naked & baring teeth. My mother once skinny-dipped with American soldiers, let them braid her hair into a thick & oiled fuse. Later, she stole their food so they ate her body, carved her bones into commas & sentenced her to death. I watch a PBS special on marines who married Asian women & didn't tell their white wives. In one scene, the white wife throws a knife & the marine ducks. I pause right before the knife arrives at my throat. Just in time, the rain knocks at my door. I answer with your name, the sound of steam escaping skin I boiled clean. I touch you with hands that have never been my hands. In the jungle we tip-toe over land mines, remember the village girl who flew apart like a frightened flock, who stained the sky with her flight. I left you to clothe every tree in the blood-musk of fingered flowers. The glimmer of your tongue a grenade pin. I pull out of your body & we blow like wind through the bones of the dead. Someday, everyone I've touched will die. Every girl who's touched me has been you. Every war has been this one.

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