A human figure leans beyond a curtain of vertical lines in a black-and-white illustration.
Original illustration by Anne Le Guern

Listen:


I counted 44 lines and while I counted, 44 Asian women were touched. People confused the 44 Asian women with each other. How did Agnes know this is the color of desire? To be an Asian woman is to be seen as night. To be able to hear a child growing but being unable to help myself. To be able to have ideas but being unable to lift them over the wall on my own. It’s August finally and no one knows that August isn’t really a month. It is one long day. Some people assume Asian women are made of flowers, but some of us are made up of lines. It’s hard to say when these lines were no longer just themselves. The minute Agnes put the brush to the canvas, they became indescribable. The sayable, by nature, is an elegy. The unsayable, outside of time. What we say, here, now, is only the part of flesh that is known.

Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s forthcoming book of poems, With My Back to the World, will be published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her prior book of poems, received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship.