Barbie Chang parks next to the
soroptomist park
to part her heart a hippopotamus
of a heart a famous hurt
fame will learn her if she lets it the
women at school will
school her if she lets them they write
letters to only each other
why bother to say hello how she fell
so hard in love with
the women at school but she is
allergic to them achoo
if they are the choo choo train she
is the track necessary but
unnoticed like the seventh tract
home on an attractive
street a streak of light missed in the
sky what if Barbie
Chang Skyped everyone only to
discover she is the
only one on the earth left the last
leaf on the last tree there
are hints of fingerprints on the window
but no more fingers just
women who once lingered with
only each other
The doctor says hospice as if
she is a hostess and
wants Barbie Chang to try the
crawfish there are
no longer many crawl spaces left
for Barbie Chang’s
mother who no longer can take
her own showers she
once was shy around Barbie Chang
but now her lungs
hurt burnt crust lost in their hardness
Barbie Chang always
thought her mother was heartless
not lungless but now
she knows the lungs were wrong
little rungs pair of
eyes that don’t get along and
their endless scarring
into honeycombs there’s nothing
scarier than something
that won’t stop fooling you
that it’s beautiful
Scarring of the heart always wins
when we cry our hearts
always whine stupid heart and its
weak alert system overly
impatient sense of self narcissist
stubborn in its endless
beating in need of assisted living
supposed to be
the center of everything the center
of attention but
not even centered Barbie Chang
has no intention of
letting the heart win because it’s the
lungs that need her
help her mother’s lungs sound like
Velcro they crackle like
its New Year’s Eve this year Barbie
Chang has bleached
clean the past but no matter how many
times she cuts and pastes
a new childhood over her old one
the neighborhood still
hates her hair color she hates her own
hair color that has a metal
odor in the sun that shows all her grays
that aren’t that many
there’s medicine for everything now but
the owl still hunts at night
her mother is not alright and the owl
is always right in the
middle of her flight she rests on her
head when someone
else is sick it’s as if there are always
noises in the empty attic
and Barbie Chang is always frantic hates
the status quo wants
something to happen cannot lie she
needs someone to die
Barbie Chang shakes the hand of
another Smith a former
beauty queen who still wins friends
at the local school sets
the rules for who is cool and who
is not the one and
only Smith is taken aback that a
Chang would be so
strange and arrange her own
handshake without
being asked first Smith and Chang
both gave birth but
the Smith would never again say
hello to a Chang even
one named Barbie unless she was
the one performing her
surgery no matter how likely the
Barbie was to change
her time zones instantly clone herself
to find a new home she
didn’t yet know that suburban
homes were filled with
people who wanted to be alone
to dial certain phones
The truth is some days Barbie Chang
wants to hang up her
Asian boots and root for the Circle
she wakes up not proud
to be what she is in a sea of water
who gets to decide
which section of water eats the ship
its always the white
water that devours there are towers of
people working in
America in America the towers extend
to Costa Rica and back
Barbie Chang can’t figure out how to
open the door of the
tower someone keeps lowering her
down to the roof she
doesn’t want to appear rude so she
stays on the roof of
Paul Muldoon’s building she wonders
if she is standing on Paul
Muldoon’s head how she wishes to be
doomed like Paul
Muldoon to win the Guggenheim like
Paul Muldoon to write
rejection letters sending them out the
New Yorker windows in
winter the letters take the snow down
like elevators
