Poem by Joanna Deng
I am ten when Xiaorui
hands me a fish by the tail,
raw,
and pokes its glassed eyes into my mouth.
I am ten when she teaches me how to gum it,
palm its intestines into a jar,
shave its scales clean of sin,
and feed its gall bladder to the dog.
I am ten and burying fish flesh in my backyard when Xiaorui
first jokes about how her husband is so sure about time
just like how she is so sure that waste doesn’t exist, especially after death and that
We as one
will kill everything in front of us
for something,
anything,
that resembles the human experience.
She says this is the same as saying
we scrape off our own skin
to feel new because we become obsessed with contamination;
like how I de-wing carp rot on old books instead of cutting boards
or like how she was born in Seoul and grew up in Beijing,
only to meet her husband after she was sold to America by her father at twelve.
At night, she tells me we are always searching for something
more than ourselves
to keep us beating
because
to breathe in the dead means to live vicariously
and that is what we are taught to do,
primal,
carnal,
When we devour things
starting from their souls.
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