From the Collection Tree of Knowledge
A wooden door in front of everything. A dooron my country. A door in the lake. My poems
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prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is adoor on my heart in the poem, then there is.
Now I can open this door. The door is a shortdoor though. I must kneel down to crawl in, drag
my body through with my wooden elbows.I bump into my wooden mother who is also
crawling in my heart. She smiles so large thather suffering lights up the tunnel. I can now
see my whole heart, not empty as I had thought.There are no people in it but my mother.
A rotten hemlock tree at the beginning of theaorta. A eucalyptus at the end. Two black Allen’s
hummingbirds. She tells me to feed my father.I don’t have the heart to tell her that near the
end, his brain had so many holes, you could lookright through it. I promise her that I will try to love
someone as much as I love her, so she doesn’tspend her death alone. She hands me a Tupperware
with rice and bok choy to give to my father. I catthe food because he must be in someone else’s
heart. Next to a fetus. I am lost in my own heartnow. I sit in the corner and count red.
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Excerpted from Tree of Knowledge: Poems by Victoria Chang. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Victoria Chang. All rights reserved
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