the blueshift journal

HISTORY

JESSICA YUAN

The men in the academy salivate

over history. They think truth

is a dark body, the knowledge leaking from it.

They think truth is a grieving woman,

truth is the thing she grieves.

They know it’s history when

someone gets hurt

and they can watch.

 

This is how I tell a story:

All the yellow people

chant the same famine,

like I’ve been assigned

no other tongue. Like this

is our labor, this is all we say.

 

This is who my story belongs to:

Instead of the years I’d need

to study ethnography I cut it short

and extend a tired ligament from my throat

to braid in my mother’s hair.

I want to write her a love song

but all they want is her pain.

I want to write about happiness

but that is not history.

I tell it like the national geographic

magazine, like look how small

her body still is.

Look at them, surviving.  

 

Here we are, surviving:

The women close their mouths

to their daughters, the daughters

weep white noise into the academy

and the intelligent men hear

what they want,

which is the real thing.

 

And this is the real thing:

How can I know what is inscribed

on my body when my body doesn’t feel

her pain. How do I say it, how do I

fight for ghost stories that

I mourn behind paper and glass.

How do I feel it when it’s not mine.

When my body was not there.

When I press my mouth into the shadow

of that most silent thing.