"What's Left?" by Marisol Brady
Superstition by Kelly Hui
In Chinese, the word shen can mean god
or body or superstition. My tongue
slips through language like
a knife, violent & double-edged.
A boy calls me beautiful & every night
I pray to my body. A boy calls me chink
& I want to leave my god.
I want to kiss a girl for the first time
in Chinese school. To understand her
body like one does a language is
the greatest superstition: like how four
rhymes with death, how pear sounds like
separation, how a haircut can
cut your lifeline. I pull mandarin
from my body until all that’s left
is bone. Once I dreamt about
telling a girl I loved her. Once I dreamt
about telling my mother I loved her.
Like every good daughter, I go through
somewhat of a rebellious phase:
I give myself a bob in the month of
the new year & all my uncles die. At the
funeral I look at mirrors & the ghosts never
stop following me. I give my
lover a pear & never see her again.
I hang fu right side up and am flipped
upside down. Someone hands me
a clock, I die every hour.
or body or superstition. My tongue
slips through language like
a knife, violent & double-edged.
A boy calls me beautiful & every night
I pray to my body. A boy calls me chink
& I want to leave my god.
I want to kiss a girl for the first time
in Chinese school. To understand her
body like one does a language is
the greatest superstition: like how four
rhymes with death, how pear sounds like
separation, how a haircut can
cut your lifeline. I pull mandarin
from my body until all that’s left
is bone. Once I dreamt about
telling a girl I loved her. Once I dreamt
about telling my mother I loved her.
Like every good daughter, I go through
somewhat of a rebellious phase:
I give myself a bob in the month of
the new year & all my uncles die. At the
funeral I look at mirrors & the ghosts never
stop following me. I give my
lover a pear & never see her again.
I hang fu right side up and am flipped
upside down. Someone hands me
a clock, I die every hour.
Kelly Hui is a poet and organizer from Massachusetts. She studies critical race & ethnic studies and creative writing at the University of Chicago, where she also edits and writes for the Chicago Maroon. Her work has been recognized by the YoungArts Foundation, Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and the Boston Mayor's Poetry Program. You can find her on Twitter @halfmoonpoem.
Marisol Brady is a self-taught photographer whose work examines the ephemerality of capitalist excess, nostalgic distortion, times we’ve had, times we’ve been told we had, and the time we have left. They cast an optimistic, neon-lensed glance at the decay precipitated by the hyper-escalating economic inequality and planetary destruction of the past four decades that, with some squinting, recognizes its transformative potential. Originally hailing from Long Island’s south shore, Marisol lives in Brooklyn.
