an island speed-crawled through my flooded

kitchen and body-tagged me

with a portion of my lunch, tuna wrapped

in a red advertisement. it was rude but

I thanked it. now you can find me anywhere

in my kitchen, even in the parts that aren’t my

kitchen but I call my kitchen because whatever

floods is a kitchen is what my mother

remembered to tell me. what my mother did

not tell me: that sometimes between the

kitchen and the living room I undergo

a casual transformation. I start to hate

capitalists and fruit seeds. I start to see

the moon as permanently wet, as

my private killzone, to watch

and throw popcorn at. I shoulder

a bb rifle and watch for unlit bodies on the

lunar new year, shoot at the areas of the sky

because this is how the lunar new year passes, I shoot at the sky

and someone tells me why I miss. little more left. I said

Left. I meant Left. Left. Left. according to lunar myth

your dreams are textured by the kind of what

you drink before you sleep. I drink that kind that makes

me pee. my bedwetting is mythical. at sleepovers,

we did each other’s hair and strung our ears with beads

and bedazzled my pee parts with a glue gun. it was

a show I dreamed, about Hurricane Katrina, the only

time my mother ever comforted me was when

I was watching the Superdome and then a fat woman

fallen on the driveway, who was not in New Orleans

but felt the hurricane spiritually, deep in her

sandbag bosom. the fat woman looked

like my mother, both were not dead, both liked

fake cashmere better than real, both felt things

at a distance. I called my mother with a doll on its way to my lung.

it probably had a hurricane name. I called with her

hurricane name hooking my lip like my battery-powered

Waterpik. why don’t you

swim your way home in it, she said, so I did, with

my sleeping bag as a decent reflector to headlights.

my myth is spontaneous,

self-generates in every mouth with two different temperatures,

I was invited to so many more sleepovers,

one house even had a trampoline and a thin bicycle

and an empty swimming pool with my name in it.

#

Kristin Chang lives in Cupertino, CA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in BOAAT Journal, Word Riot, Winter Tangerine Review, TheEEEL, and elsewhere. She is looking forward to the next lunar new year. She is located at kristinchang.com.