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exiled parts of my body

By Witness Magazine
Poetry•Vol. 34 No. 2

by Jieyan Wang

my last name dwells in my throat. 汪, meaning
a lot of water. enough to drown myself with
myself. we’re cold my body says to me far too cold.

*

the hairs behind my ears are always raised.
they are waiting for a flower petal. what falls
& never forgets. belonging lives in soft pink.

*

the distance between china & america lies in
the constellations & what counts them the hand writes
one: you were born where your ancestors weren’t.

*

目: two slashes through a box, chinese for eye.
i almost understand it: eyelids half-closed like
a sentence. the pupil: it expands into a period.

*

if you spread your arms my mother says the wind
will close its long-winded lips around you. no wonder
i can’t fly. girl is featherless even with the long l.

*

insomnia brushes against my shoulders. i hug it
so it twitches like a child who believes she will
live forever. it hushes into the base of my neck.

*

add a dot on top of 目 to get self. 自: an eye
with a single lash measuring me. i see you
so i can open your loneliness. let me 飞飞飞.

*

where does water go? it tends towards ocean,
where salt is the mother of every question. let’s go to
where you’ll dissolve my body murmurs, already blurring.

 

 


Jieyan Wang is a first-year college student at Harvard University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Passages North, Baltimore Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other publications. She is also a reader for The Adroit Journal.

 

 

 

Witness blends the features of a literary and an issue-oriented magazine to highlight the role of the modern writer as witness to his or her times. Launched in Detroit in 1987, the magazine is best known for showcasing work that defines its historical moment; special issues have focused on political oppression, religion, the natural world, crime, aging, civil rights, love, ethnic America, and exile. The issues “New Nature Writing,” “The Sixties,” “Sports in America,” and “The Best of Witness, 1987 – 2004” eventually appeared as university press anthologies. In 2007, Witness moved to Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The magazine publishes one print issue and one online issue a year, and increasingly seeks out work that contextualizes the American experience by highlighting issues of global concern.

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