Status Updates From With My Back to the World: ...

Some people assume Asian women are made of flowers, but some of us are made up of lines. It's hard to say when these lines were no longer just themselves. The minute Agnes put the brush to the canvas, they became indescribable. The sayable, by nature, is an elegy. The unsayable, outside of time. What we say, here, now, is only the part of flesh that is known.

How to reconcile the fact that I want to make art but don't want to be criticized. That I want to be loved but I don't want to open my mouth. That I want to be saved but I don't want to kneel down. Pessoa said, In order to understand, I destroyed myself.

The first time I’ve sat down to read anything in….uh….three weeks??

At this hour, a line is the thing with a human face. There is no hope in shapes. There is just the line and the sound of its scratch as it crosses out memory. Perhaps it's not memory we're trying to capture, but everything instead of it.

I am trying to draw a woman’s heartbeat, not the heart. The sensation of being strangled, not the hands around my neck.

Everyone arrives one day and asks, is this it? And the stars answer back with more stars.

“So many people would die to have what you have, a man said to me yesterday. I told him that the conundrum is there, in the sentence.”

I wonder when she stopped painting and if she knew. I have a feeling the shape of her last breath was no longer a triangle. I have a feeling her last word was in the shape of sovereignty. Every poem is trying to be the last free words on earth.

On some nights, I am so below the line that I leave my breathing outside by accident. By the time I realize it, all the horses have taken my breathing and run off. For once, I am not being chased by my own language. The horses are surprised to have speech, but die within an hour of using it.

When death was near, I could touch time. It was
softer than I thought it would be. There were
two of them. When I tried to measure their
lengths, I was sent back to the living. I
was shorter but my shadow was longer.

…I used to think depression was all around me, that I was within it. Now I see that it is always ahead of me. That it is in pieces, but it moves in a swarm.

…There was a time when we didn’t think about happiness, when it was possible not to think about something because there was no word for it yet. Then perhaps language is ruin. Agnes said, in all the arts, technique is a hazard even as it is in living life. Then what are we to do with language? Once the whales are gone, an ocean isn’t an ocean anymore. And then we get to rename it.

Maybe the present is so loud because we grow thinking the future

is possible, but soon realize we are estranged from it,
just as we are estranged from the ocean.

...Once in a museum, with my face an inch from Modigliani's portrait of Beatrice Hastings, a man ran up to me so fast, I only remember the way his hair smelled like incense. Stay one foot away please, he said. He was breathing so hard that I thought he knew that I had wanted to die just that morning. And that his hand touching my arm was meant to keep me from jumping off the balcony....

...All night, my
thoughts are
shaped like birds. In the
morning, I lean in
closer to the
mirror and
someone has
drawn lines
across my face.
I realize that
failure consists of
both the
outline and the
outlined. That
lines are
not meant
to hold in
our
emptiness.

I don’t think I understand poetry