Ting Lin
A Purpose for Those Without
My mother carved out her ovaries
the same August I lost my virginity to
a storm of a girl, then told me
I should bear a child by thirty.
In this family, our womanhood poisons us.
Bitter are these pearls we inherited. So i understood:
loss, so I understood barren.
My mother stares at period products on
supermarket shelves. Something to stop the blood.
I am seventeen but the years pass
and they keep passing. Mama: my longing is the wrong kind.
I watch her bend over the sink,
golden light streaming through the window
illuminating her spine.
Ting, she named me— means listen,
to our rivers, our forests, our typhoons.
She tells me to pray harder.
I‘m leaving home as she teaches me our language.
Lok yu daai, seui jam gaai. Heavy rain, drowning street.
I can sing it but I cannot speak plainly, the intonation
too brittle for my crooked tongue.
At Nanhua temple she burns her thin red incense year after year,
and I love every child I see through the smoke,
passing her by.
the same August I lost my virginity to
a storm of a girl, then told me
I should bear a child by thirty.
In this family, our womanhood poisons us.
Bitter are these pearls we inherited. So i understood:
loss, so I understood barren.
My mother stares at period products on
supermarket shelves. Something to stop the blood.
I am seventeen but the years pass
and they keep passing. Mama: my longing is the wrong kind.
I watch her bend over the sink,
golden light streaming through the window
illuminating her spine.
Ting, she named me— means listen,
to our rivers, our forests, our typhoons.
She tells me to pray harder.
I‘m leaving home as she teaches me our language.
Lok yu daai, seui jam gaai. Heavy rain, drowning street.
I can sing it but I cannot speak plainly, the intonation
too brittle for my crooked tongue.
At Nanhua temple she burns her thin red incense year after year,
and I love every child I see through the smoke,
passing her by.
Biography
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Ting Lin (she/her) grew up in Guangzhou and Toronto. Her poems explore themes of queerness, femininity, and migration. She is currently an undergraduate student at Stanford University studying Anthropology. You can find her on Twitter @imtootiredfor where she posts about her dog too much.
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