“Hemlock, 1956,” a Poem by Victoria Chang
From the Collection Tree of Knowledge
A wooden door in front of everything. A door
on my country. A door in the lake. My poems
prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a
door on my heart in the poem, then there is.
Now I can open this door. The door is a short
door though. I must kneel down to crawl in, drag
my body through with my wooden elbows.
I bump into my wooden mother who is also
crawling in my heart. She smiles so large that
her suffering lights up the tunnel. I can now
see my whole heart, not empty as I had thought.
There are no people in it but my mother.
A rotten hemlock tree at the beginning of the
aorta. A eucalyptus at the end. Two black Allen’s
hummingbirds. She tells me to feed my father.
I don’t have the heart to tell her that near the
end, his brain had so many holes, you could look
right through it. I promise her that I will try to love
someone as much as I love her, so she doesn’t
spend her death alone. She hands me a Tupperware
with rice and bok choy to give to my father. I cat
the food because he must be in someone else’s
heart. Next to a fetus. I am lost in my own heart
now. I sit in the corner and count red.
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Excerpted from Tree of Knowledge: Poems by Victoria Chang. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Victoria Chang. All rights reserved
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s latest book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), her prior book of poems, was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Time Must-Read Book, and received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also longlisted for a National Book Award and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and lives in Los Angeles and is a faculty member within Antioch’s low-residency MFA Program and Acting Program Chair.
