Valerie Hsiung: A Body Without Sex Without Scrutiny

Three excerpts from I did it, I said it

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Paper thin enough for holes

The throat of a newborn bird receiving the vomit of his mother

Will you touch me

She asked the world

Which to her appeared as the face

Of her beloved

Over a bluish grayish subtext a face in a windshield

A compression that expands

A fist through plywood

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Hanging down from a pole

It’s a body without sex without scrutiny without booths full of kleenex

Walking into the ocean

See the holes in the wall in the shape and in the size of a person’s head

The picture frame tilted ever so slightly so that today it couldn’t be hidden

The way a face can turn

In empathy and in travesty

Like one sway of the branch

One last marathon / One last hurrah

Ten more years / or a thousand…

The scars she had to prove what everyone else thought was just a myth

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It comes and it goes

But is never there if she tries too intently to control it

If she tries too intently to ensnare it

I don’t want to be

The murderer of a dinner party gone fussy

And see that’s where intention can have

Its own twisted downfalls

He hands me an archival catalogue of White House State Dinner menus

The instinct for control or predation

A wooden coat rack from a white house snapped in half

Because he was angry

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Poet and performer Valerie Hsiung is the author of three full-length poetry collections: e f g: a trilogy (Action Books, 2016), incantation inarticulate (O Balthazar Press, 2013), and under your face (OBP, 2013). Her poetry and interviews can be found or is forthcoming in an array of places, including American Letters & Commentary, Apiary, Black Nerd Problems, Cloud Rodeo, Cosmonauts Avenue, Bone Bouquet, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Luna  Luna Magazine, Mad Hatters’ Review, Moonshot, New Delta Review, PEN Poetry Series, Prelude, RealPoetik, Tammy, and VOLT. She has performed at Casa Libre en la Solana, Common Area Maintenance, Leon Gallery, Poetic Research Bureau, Rhizome, Shapeshifter Lab, and Treefort Music Festival, among elsewhere. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Hsiung studied literary translation and ecopoetics at Brown University and is currently based out of Brooklyn, New York, where she works as a modern-day matchmaker. She serves as an editor for Poor Claudia. Find her online at http://flowersintheirmouths.com