August 2005

Two Poems by Victoria Chang ’92

Instinct
Listen to "Instinct" mp3 (requires audio plugin)

In 2002, Lee Boyd Malvo and John Allen Muhammad killed ten people and wounded three in sniper attacks surrounding Washington, DC.

Because they are aware somehow, and cannot flee from their knowledge,

the pair of ducks waits by the pool until I am done swimming, the female mottled in buffy-brown,

squatting at the pool’s edge, the male upright, metallic green head like a tower.

They enter one orange foot at a time when they hear the click of the gate, signaling my exit.

Where did they learn this distance?

Did they witness duck decoys, men camouflaged in marshy pot holes, the flight of a damaged mallard?

Or is it instinct, the way we stop at a lion’s mane or a grizzly’s upright bellow?

The snipers folded down the back seat, access to the trunk for a gunport and a rifle.

They practiced aiming, breath control, did drills on shapes and shooter cards.

They waved to neighbors, mowed their lawn, purchased donuts at the Cirkle K, said pardon and no thank you.

What if the ducks are right in fearing everything, even their own?

Face
Listen to "Face" mp3 (requires audio plugin)

I know you must think
that I am the only thing

that belongs solely to you
and when you die, I will

disappear with you—my
skin, muscles, nerves,

vessels, galloping to keep
up with your last breath,

for I am slower to go,
like cells of muscle and

bone. But there is no
need to worry about me.

You cannot know how
wrong you are. Look

around in the streets—
a girl’s nose mimics mine,

and a young boy’s lips
also frown like a severed

stalk, thirsty for sun.
Long after you die, I will

still live everywhere,
erupting from the soil

each year, part here, part
there, and my grin will ever last

somewhere in someone.

###

Victoria Chang ’92 earned her BA in East Asian Studies. Circle is her first book, the result of a competition organized by the Crab Orchard Series and published by the Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale (2005), available at www.siu/~siupress.

Chang, who works ‘remotely’ at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she earned an MBA, ‘writing and researching with professors,’ is also completing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.

Chang is the recipient of a Bread Loaf scholarship, a Kenyon Writer’s Workshop Taylor Fellowship and other honors.

The U-M’s Linda Gregerson, poet and professor of English, calls Chang ‘a master of the thumbnail narrative’ with a gift for ‘astringent understatement and wry economy.’

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