This Corner of the Western World

By Jennifer Chang Jennifer Chang

Dark thing,

make a myth of yourself:

all women turn into lilacs,

all men grow sick of their errant scent.

You could learn

to build a window, to change flesh

into isinglass, nothing

but a brittle river, a love of bone.

You could snap like a branch—No,

this way, he says, and the fence

releases the forest,

and every blue insect finds an inch of skin.

He loves low voices, diffidence

on the invented trail,

the stones you fuck him on. Yes

to sweat’s souvenir, yes to his fist

in your hair, you bite

because you can. Silence

rides the back of your throat,

his tongue, your name.

Source: The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008)

Biography

Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She is a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she is a PhD candidate.

Chang’s lyrical poems often explore the shifting boundaries between the outer world and the self. Chang’s debut poetry collection, The History of Anonymity (2008), was selected for the Virginia Quarterly Review’s Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Shenandoah/ Glasgow Prize for . . .

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