Juliana Chang
In the summer, Chris and I go dancing in Taiwan
and we spend the night avoiding a man I scared off on Tinder
with a rant about the literary merits of rom-coms
and why it’s fucking sexist to be prescriptive
about what film genres smart women get to like—and Chris is
a smart woman, sees volcano in my eyes the moment we spot him,
will pop and lock around me all night so that I never
have to share the same square of dance floor
as Charlie-who-is-surprised-a-girl-like-you-enjoyed-When-Harry-Met-Sally.
Chris, designated Large American of this trip,
cannot speak a word of Mandarin,
puts her body on the line to guard mine.
In the mornings we eat mango ice,
take turns swatting each other’s greedy hands off
swollen mosquito bites, threaten one another
with increasingly bizarre post-climate-change world orders
if you don’t stop scratching RIGHT. NOW.
Chris loves the subway more than anyone
so we take it everywhere, stay on two stations past our stop
so she can see the river, the way it holds the city by the shoulders
like an old friend: once, in college, I woke up after a night of crying
to find a box of vanilla tea sitting outside my door,
a handwritten note telling me to be gentle.
We scream Lizzo lyrics while biking.
We buy too many earrings.
We hike Elephant Mountain in matching jean jackets
and sweat ourselves into a parallel universe.
Chris is dumb bitch hours 24/7, like the FamilyMart
where she won’t stop buying shrimp chips,
(the ones she can’t eat without breaking out in hives),
and it is silly, really, how much her destructive
looks like her love.
As in: do you have shin ramen nearby?
As in: one more scratch and we’ll lose the ice caps.
As in: show me the parts of yourself you love least.
I will pull them into a freestyle circle
in the center of the dance floor.
I will keep you moving to the music
until your hurt grows small enough
to hold in one hand, or one eight count,
until we have created more, here, than you’ve lost
with a rant about the literary merits of rom-coms
and why it’s fucking sexist to be prescriptive
about what film genres smart women get to like—and Chris is
a smart woman, sees volcano in my eyes the moment we spot him,
will pop and lock around me all night so that I never
have to share the same square of dance floor
as Charlie-who-is-surprised-a-girl-like-you-enjoyed-When-Harry-Met-Sally.
Chris, designated Large American of this trip,
cannot speak a word of Mandarin,
puts her body on the line to guard mine.
In the mornings we eat mango ice,
take turns swatting each other’s greedy hands off
swollen mosquito bites, threaten one another
with increasingly bizarre post-climate-change world orders
if you don’t stop scratching RIGHT. NOW.
Chris loves the subway more than anyone
so we take it everywhere, stay on two stations past our stop
so she can see the river, the way it holds the city by the shoulders
like an old friend: once, in college, I woke up after a night of crying
to find a box of vanilla tea sitting outside my door,
a handwritten note telling me to be gentle.
We scream Lizzo lyrics while biking.
We buy too many earrings.
We hike Elephant Mountain in matching jean jackets
and sweat ourselves into a parallel universe.
Chris is dumb bitch hours 24/7, like the FamilyMart
where she won’t stop buying shrimp chips,
(the ones she can’t eat without breaking out in hives),
and it is silly, really, how much her destructive
looks like her love.
As in: do you have shin ramen nearby?
As in: one more scratch and we’ll lose the ice caps.
As in: show me the parts of yourself you love least.
I will pull them into a freestyle circle
in the center of the dance floor.
I will keep you moving to the music
until your hurt grows small enough
to hold in one hand, or one eight count,
until we have created more, here, than you’ve lost
Biography
Juliana Chang is a Taiwanese American writer, storyteller, and filmmaker. She is the 2019 recipient of the Urmy/Hardy Poetry Prize, the 2017 recipient of the Wiley Birkhofer Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Scholastic Art & Writing Gold Medalist in Poetry. She received a BA in Linguistics and a MA in Sociology from Stanford University in 2019. Find her on Twitter @julianawrites_, Instagram @julianawritespoems, and on the web www.julianachang.com