Poetry

Victoria Chang is the author of several poetry collections: Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Salvinia Molesta; Circle; and The Boss, winner of the PEN Center USA Poetry Award and a California Book Award. Other honors include the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award and a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches in the MFA program at Antioch University.

Photograph by Margaret Molloy.

Poems from OBIT

by Victoria Chang


Obit

Doctors—died on August 3, 2015. Dr. Lynch, Dr. Chang, Dr. Mahoney, the ER doctors, the nurses, their blank faces pulling thin blankets up to my mother’s shoulders, the frozen summers. When Dr. Mahoney finally arrived, I always forgot all my questions. My heart opened like an umbrella. He said he was leaving the practice and I wondered why we call groups of doctors a practice, as if not yet experts. Maybe because they can’t know how to die until they die. When he spoke, I tried not to emit warmth. He wanted to do something different, as if saving my mother could be a career option. He talked for twenty minutes. I forgot about my mother in the small bed, just a curtain separating her and the three moaning women. How we go in and out of caring about others. As I returned to my mother’s room, I slid down the microscope and felt myself shrinking.
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