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Naomi Ling

self-portrait as unborn chinese girl

            --tw: death, historical events, blood
 
Here, I am the womb of my own mother. consider
how it began—the wailing that cleaved our
girlhood, milky dissection. umbilical cord
 
cut. our limbs, pried from liquid decay, veiny
diaspora. how honest. I remember hands
breaking into the marrow of my throat. how
 
they killed something else, too—I didn't know
what. our tongues, sluiced and preserved in a little
red book. tell me how this ends, mother, how
 
we assumed the form of discarded angels, glassy
eyes puckered up at a cloudless sky. porcelain
wrists. a faceless man, arranging our bodies with
 
a chokehold of lust. there is no fairytale here.
I've always wanted to end quietly—how desperate
it seemed to leech the blood from your body, a cry
 
for attention like a righteous knife to motherland. yes,
to end like this, pink ribbons discarded
at the browbone of upturned soil. perhaps someone
 
will utter an elegy. in these last moments, I fist a happy
ending—see, a girl heading to the market
with rosy cheeks and ebony hips. she is alive. I laugh and
 
laugh in envy. oh, how I've always wanted to end like a
bird—a softened bullet, a trembling powerline, and then
a million feathers, carrying my body to the north star.

Biography

Picture
Naomi Ling (she/her) is a Sino-American student on the East Coast, USA. The founding EIC of Gossamer Lit, she also serves on the editorial team of four other journals. Her works have been recognized nationally by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, Sad Girls Lit, and Top Ten Poetry and are forthcoming in Eunoia Review, FEED, all guts no glory, and elsewhere. She tweets unprofessionally @naomilingwrites.
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ISSN 2639-426X
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  • Home
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  • Issues
    • Issue 49
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    • Issue 46
    • Issue 45
    • Issue 44
    • Issue 43
    • Issue 42
    • Issue 41
    • Issue 40
    • Issue 39
    • Issue 38
    • Issue 37
    • Issue 36
    • Issue 35
    • Issue 34
    • Issue 33
    • Issue 32
    • Issue 31
    • Issue 30
    • Issue 29
    • Issue 28
    • Issue 27
    • Issue 26
    • Issue 25
    • Issue 24
    • Issue 23
    • Issue 22
    • Issue 21
    • Issue 20
    • Issue 19
    • Issue 18
    • Serenity
    • Issue 17
    • The Audio Room
    • Issue 16
    • Issue 15
    • Issue 14
    • Play It Again
    • Issue 13
    • Issue 12
    • Issue 11
    • Issue 10
    • Issue 9
    • Issue 8
    • Issue 7
    • Issue 6
    • Hand to Mouth
    • Issue 5
    • Issue 4
    • Issue 3
    • Issue 2
    • Issue 1
  • Submissions