A timbered gate before everything. A portal over my country. A doorway within the lake. My verses
prefer wooden hunting hounds. If I declare that a door resides in my heart within this poem, then indeed there is one.
Now I am able to swing this portal open. Yet the doorway remains brief. I must bend low to squeeze through, pulling
my body along with my wooden elbows. I collide with my wooden mother, who is likewise
crawling through the heart. Her smile is so wide that her suffering illuminates the tunnel. At last I can
see my entire heart, not barren as I had supposed. There are no others inside it but my mother.
A rotted hemlock tree marks the start of the aorta. A eucalyptus greets the end. Two black Allen’s
hummingbirds hover. She instructs me to feed my father. I lack the heart to tell her that near the
end, his brain bore so many holes you could peep right through it. I promise her I will strive to love
someone as deeply as I love her, so she does not die alone. She hands me a Tupperware
filled with rice and bok choy to give to my father. I eat the meal because he must be in someone else’s
heart. Beside a fetus. I become lost inside my own heart now. I settle in the corner and count red.
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Selected from Tree of Knowledge: Poems by Victoria Chang. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. © 2026 Victoria Chang. All rights reserved
