From Obit: Poems
My Father’s Frontal Lobe—died
unpeacefully of a stroke on June 24,
2009 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in
San Diego, California. Born January
20, 1940, the frontal lobe enjoyed a
good life. The frontal lobe loved being
the boss. It tried to talk again but
someone put a bag over it. When the
frontal lobe died, it sucked in its lips like
a window pulled shut. At the funeral
for his words, my father wouldn’t stop
talking and his love passed through
me, fell onto the ground that wasn’t
there. I could hear someone stomping
their feet. The body is as confusing as
language—was the frontal lobe having
a tantrum or dancing? When I took
my father’s phone away, his words
died in the plastic coffin. At the funeral
for his words, we argued about my
miscarriage. It’s not really a baby, he
said. I ran out of words, stomped out to
shake the dead baby awake. I thought
of the tech who put the wand down,
quietly left the room when she couldn’t
find the heartbeat. I understood then
that darkness is falling without an end.
That darkness is not the absorption of
color but the absorption of language.
Excerpted from Obit: Poems, by Victoria Chang, copyright © 2020 by Victoria Chang, reprinted with the permission of the Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
