Chang ‘E 嫦娥
To say that the act of a woman is the act of a foreigner, an
immigrant, to set itself to and from these coordinates.
For a body in travel is above all loosening itself, the slow
migration of tectonic plates. It is the contradiction of losing
homeland in search of homeland, it is the rules it breaks, the
displacement it shapes, the silence of a hem torn and
hemmed with thread, made up after all by some perforation
of gravity—
For distant planets and other objects; for meteorology; for
mapmaking.
Look: moon as the motion that is undoing in this moment.
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“Biography of Women in the Sea” originally appeared in MOON: Letters, Maps, Poems (Tarpaulin Sky, 2018). It appears in They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets, available via Blue Oak Press.
