Chang - Hybrida: poems

Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 Book design by Lovedog Studio Production manager: Julia Druskin The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Chang, Tina, author. Title: Hybrida : poems / Tina Chang. Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. | American poetry21st century. | American poetry21st century.

Classification: LCC PS3603.H3574 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056723 ISBN 9781324002499 (eBook) W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS FOR JULIETTE & ROMAN CONTENTS Everywhere I look I see him, I have a right to fear for him, though I have no right to claim his color.

His blackness is his to own and what will my mouth say of that sweetness. Am I colorless worn like a veil, invisible but present. He is a word grown upright and some claim he is journalism, media around me, so much light filtered through, so much video of him, I shut it out, the body shot through and I will not let him out the door. Sideways, I view a lens. If you could see the green field, the cows with their maternal gazes, instinct at their hooves, leaning into calves, edging in. They come closer.

When there is no more color, I turn an old-fashioned knob of the TV, black-and-white frames, where I view a hose releasing water, dogs bark at the leash of time. My son turns off the television believing its an ancient toy. He sits on my lap and we lean against a wall, he and I in the room. We watch the door. ~ Origin ~ Im without body but forming in the latticework of blood cell and fret. Each threat pulls me upward tempting and building me until my spine lifts into a column, a kingdom.

I can imagine life shaped as God-self, a fortress grows beyond me. Seeing into that distance, I glow. The heart begins first in sound like footsteps up a staircase, the curled fist knocks for entrance, the heart courses into garnet-being heavier than matter, lighter than flame. I find shape, I shift from spirit and my lungs heave with gravity, float into the presence of air. I wonder if my mother is summoning me. Isnt that her song parting the curtains, isnt that the cry that opens the shutters? She says changeling, become a boy .

Once I was a dream animal running. I knew there was something larger than me calling and I ran after it like prey, as if I knew it had to be mine. I salivated, seized by a charge, I wondered. My mind rose into a volcano, molten heat surged like the ire of my future. I am now searching for my mother to find completion slick as sound, rough as water, I am scaling, sniffing for utterance, a timber, a lost call, howling at the stars, and my eyes, bright diamonds with which to see by, my mouth, these rough shores I invite you to walk. When Im large enough will you recognize me? I am your son.

I never found any form to be truer. I am fighting to be alive, fighting to be one. ~ Beyond is a voice and it says: There is a car and the door is about to open. There is a voice and it answers: And destruction is pointed at the boy of history. The future is the shadow of a boy, arms raised whose eyes widen toward bloom as they stand: two bodies of struggle. The officer believes the instruments sermon, believes the gun is fueled when he shines it.

Color the cloth violence. He buffs the bright cylinder from which the bullet will emerge and points it toward a future intention. Color the cloth vengeance for it has no true name. Are justice and victory the same laurels? The world spins mindful of its past. I envision, now, my son rising, arms above him, like hosanna out of a car. and Michael Brown Jr. called his father, his voice trembling. called his father, his voice trembling.

He had seen something overpowering. In the thick gray clouds that lingered from a passing storm this past June, he made out an angel. And he saw Satan chasing the angel and the angel running into the face of God. Is poetry proof of evidence? says one student. If so, wouldnt we be assuming there is a guilty party? says another student. ~ I walked the night searching for my fathers approval.

I arrived at his funeral, my belly heavy not with burden but with the weight of his absence. I searched for him the way a gull searches for a tide whose fury carries it across years. When it lands it heaves with the breathless knowledge of oceans. Now my son can see. Now his lips have formed. Now he hears me.

When my son was born, his cry fell into a well. There was a ripple in the water whose rings circle out to infinity. It fashions its own pattern of luck and light. I anointed my son: one who lives without ancestors, apart from the pride. ~ Hosanna In the New Testament, Christ arrives in Jerusalem and is hailed as the Deliverer . Translated from Hebrew Hosanna means save now, a petition to be set free.

When the multitudes spread palm branches before Christ, they recognized him as the King who would free them from bondage. ~ I named him Roman after lost empires frozen in time to their historical might. Roman, imagined horses surging, racing toward a colossal urge, a triumph which has no name. Roman, nothing could touch him. Nothing could harm him, his name a shield, a circle of fire surrounding him in which nothing, no authority, no will, no gun, no warring cacophony of insurgence, no charging battalion could touch him. Roman sounds like run if uttered quickly, for the towering structure he will be.

Roman, warrior. Roman Ren. Ren, after my own father who died too soon. Ren, a brother to many men. Roman, I yell after him when I see him on his bicycle riding too far from me. I yell after him, again and again.

Roman, Roman, Roman. He cant hear me. The only way I learned about him was from a guy calling me on my phone. I was able to look on his phone and say that is my son lying in the streets for hours. Hours. Lesley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown ~ There are portraits on the wall, ones of self-identification.

In kindergarten, his teacher lays out the colors theyll use for their portraits. Her hand touches a leaf of paper and she names it mocha. Another hand on a page she claims is umber. Chosen. Branded. From of a stack of construction paper my son picks a color for his face.

Gleeful, he works with scissors awkwardly making what he believes to be a replica. He cuts large waves for hair and pastes it atop the oval head, Elmers glue seeps from the undersides of paper. When he is done, he tears a large red swath which is the mouth curled into joy. No teeth, just lips turned up into a grin like a boat afloat at sea. ~ Hunter The face in darkness is on the verge of vanishing. Hes swallowed by a growing furnace of a mouth.

Hes been having night visions where the self eats the self. The officer wakes to this vision the morning of the hearing and when he is questioned his face is flushed. He remembers to use words that will make Michael Brown seem threatening: Make him the hunter. Make the boy the hunter. I will be the prey. ~ In a future story, they bound through grasses. ~ In a future story, they bound through grasses.