from THE VOICE OF THE LADY IN THE MOON
based loosely on the Chinese folktale
嫦娥 CHANG ‘E:
嫦娥 CHANG ‘E:
We learned this lesson from the whales: the larger the gap between bodies, the more satisfying it is when we come close. Or: Having spent years like an insect inside a walnut shell the only way I knew how, it is possible that one day I might push outward, clear the atmosphere around me. A shell can be a slow grave from which one is trying to wake. The house is leaning to the right; catch it, if you will. The wings of a moth are thin as paper, and out there in the dark the whales are all ever pushing outward, in search of something that will hold their attention, keep their heft.
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FROM THE VOICE OF THE LADY IN THE MOON
based loosely on the Chinese folktale
嫦娥 CHANG ‘E:
嫦娥 CHANG ‘E:
To unbuild in order to build; I kept myself empty for something to fill. But in the meantime, a missing doorknob, the splintered chair, weather seeping in through unseen cracks. We remind ourselves how moths navigate: when light is obscured, their bodies are drawn through constellatory fields of magnetic orbit. I move slowly through the house, dragging dust and light. In the morning when I wake the whales are spread along the beach. In the morning the whales are swimming inshore and southward, slow and disorganized. The reports say, two dozen stranded themselves. Outside the bathroom window, a layer of the exterior had peeled and was flapping violently in the wind, a sound I mistook for a bird seeking flight.
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Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of the forthcoming hybrid book MOON: LETTERS, MAPS, POEMS, selected by Bhanu Kapil as winner of the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. Her debut book, HOUSE A, was selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize, and her work appears in Tin House, AGNI, DIAGRAM, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received fellowships and awards from Brown University, the University of Iowa, the U.S. Fulbright program, Kundiman, Bread Loaf, and the Academy of American Poets. Having grown up in Texas and Hong Kong, she lives in San Francisco. Her website is www.jenniferscheng.com.
Sarah Malakoff’s large-scale color photographs are examinations of the home as both a refuge from and at times a re-creation of the outside world. She has had solo exhibitions at Camerawork Gallery in Portland, Oregon; Miller Yezerski Gallery in Boston, Massachusetts; The Vermont Center for Photography in Brattleboro, Vermont; the Sol Mednick Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts; and Plane Space in New York, New York. She received 2001 and 2011 Fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a 2011 Fellowship from the SMFA, Boston. A monograph, Sarah Malakoff: Second Nature, was published by Charta Art Books in 2013. She is an Assistant Professor at UMass Dartmouth and her work can be seen at www.sarahmalakoff.com.