Abigail Chang

How I Live

After a little while of holding it in
I decide to get ink on my arms.

Great patches of it.

Tracing along the spine of the night
I notice three ridges
where the toes should be,
which is not at all auspicious.

So I only go when the light begins to gray, every
beam spread thin like headhair. Every night
holding me in transit. Between the it and the then.
I can’t see
very far beyond the turn
which is always moving away from us,

and we had promised we’d be together for
this prehistoric moment. A moment which is trying
to become the pelt that does the holding.
I can’t seem to forgive

and I’ve already forgotten how to forget.
I just keep on eating olives.
With bread or spread thin,

or mixed with cheese, until they start rolling
down my throat with no effort at all, as if
they were the marbles and I was the track.

We were barely children when we planted
an olive plant
in a little pot of terracotta,

the former of which blossomed
into a tree,
which later outgrew the pot, which fell
backwards off our balcony, and landed with a
noisy splat on the ground several
floors below. Do you remember?
It was a wet, cold,
noisy morning with too much rain.

I don’t think you’d remember.
You would have been too big, while
I was still in that pocket of time

when I was young and impressionable,
and all was well.

Here, in the square and at night, the lamps hum
quietly to themselves and I can’t see far beyond
my own hand. But the tattoo parlour is close by,
and even through the fog
I can see the familiar glow
of a 7-11.

Turning to our mother,
I ask her the time.

Just this once I hold it in and she seems to appreciate this.
I compliment the brim of her hat, which is blue.
Our car bumps lightly over the soap
and for a moment I feel as if I am home.

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Abigail Chang is a writer based in Taipei, Taiwan. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cortland Review, Citron Review, Gone Lawn, Gulf Stream, Parentheses Journal and elsewhere. Find her at twitter @honeybutterball