Poem by Jennifer S. Cheng: “Inside Our Killing”

Inside Our Killing

In the end: our dead animal. Mottled fur, and I have sucked you dry. Marrow the bone with which I cleanse my teeth.

For once what wasn’t at my own hands or was it. To be born in a country with open eyes. When a wave that comes to accept the houses, didn’t I already think the sea not far enough? Didn’t I always think our footprints not ajar enough? I should have left more wet my wounds. I mean: I should have loosened my fear.

Take, for example, the hermit crab, I said. I might have remembered the act of losing. Carapace scattered around the beach, I said. The shells are emptied, abandoned; they are waiting for history to declare them whole.

And I licked it clean with both hands. To let my mother inside. Whose betrayal, if it still didn’t count broken enough. Whose betrayal: Someone was blocking the door, and I said Oh, sorry.

If I: just wanted home.

If I: looking at the shadows in the tidepools, waving her over. And behind us, the burning house. If I: didn’t see our god, coming to swallow us whole.

The truth is, it was already loose. We have always been treading water. Always moving in circles, slowness inside my eye. I found my hipbone pressing into the rock without my knowing. A hope turned evil for how desperately one shores.

A shadow comes to our door and I refuse to say who, lest I be wrong again. To be wrong, I called my father. He said fight like a nonchalant sound like a lesson in belonging, and in my heart I knew a  leaking body is not a fruit set at my doorstep is not at all but ruptured, disclosed. Emanating.

In Lamentations, the sky is skinned open for the mouth to hole.

I mean: our bodies, let open.