Elegy with a Chinese Checkerboard

← v8n1, Spring 2009

An old man lifts a lime tree, ashes

fall from his cigarette like asterisks.

He doesn’t look up.

Our forms of bodies and strollers map

into the land. Cement steams against

stucco torsos and unblinking

blades of new sod. We are latched to this

landscape, where trees need

wooden sticks to stand straight, where workers

trim thistle on the trail,

each day working their way westward,

where fields are

aerated into a Chinese checkerboard,

plugs of brown dirt

lost like confetti, like something to

celebrate.

grief family immigration place

Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang is the author of four books of poetry including Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), and The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013), which won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her picture book, Is Mommy? (Beach Lane Books, 2015) was illustrated by Marla Frazee and was named a New York Times Notable Children’s Book of 2015 . She was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017 and teaches poetry at Chapman University and the Orange County School of the Arts.