Victoria Chang
USA

Victoria Chang's first book of poetry, Circle, won the Crab Orchard Review Award Series in Poetry, and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2005. It won the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and was a Finalist for the 2005 PEN Center USA Literary Award, as well as a Finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Her second book will be published in the Fall of 2008 by the University of Georgia Press, as part of the VQR Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in journals such as The Paris Review, The Nation, POETRY, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Triquarterly, and Best American Poetry 2005. She is the editor of an anthology titled: Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, published by The University of Illinois Press. She resides in Southern California with her husband and daughter, and works as a business writer.

Seven Stages of Genocide

I am teal. You look seemingly bull.
Even the moon is looking for partialities—
it shines blue on a field, but soaks
a hummingbird in snow.

I am a Jew in my mother’s nightgown.
You are a Gypsy who has a paper route.
And there are Red-skinned locusts everywhere
that wait to rise.

A soldier called us a herd of ignorant sheep.
Then shear away our whispers,
make us feel your draft.

I have the snow’s countenance.
Neighbors covered with hard black hairs
prick me and I do not trust them.
They could make an enemy
out of footprints in snow.

The death lists are up. Next to me stands
the neighbor I hate and his rabid dog that foams
and foams. The barbed wire around us forces me
to catch his breath that smells like goose.

When they tire, they bury my neighbor from
the neck down and let the German Shepards at him.
How his fists must have tried to clench.

Near the covered ditches, only
an ocean keeps confessing
starfish to shore.

First appeared in SaltHill

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