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.