Anna May Wong As Optical Illusions
Fig 1.
When I arrived within the wintered studio,
I arrived at the centre of the vacillating concrete jungle
that has shaken off its bare-brambled branches
of old lineages.
I arrived at a scintillating heliosphere, white heat and
sunspots, where the light fell through
the darkest shadows
with greatest intensity.
Fig 2.
I was told, at the centre,
the camera would render all things immaterial—
colours, greasepaint, expectation and caste.
The house of my childhood would crumble
in a stack of irises,
And the acetone would peel back
like the eye of a hurricane.
In Crimson City, I was hostess of the Inn
of a Thousand Daggers,
San Francisco Chronicle’s
Oriental Cinderella,
Teaching my costar
to weave chopsticks to crop
circle me out of existence,
And I learnt that if I stared long enough
at the bird, it became a period
in the distance.
If I stared long enough at the face,
it became an appendage
absolved of its body.
If I stayed long enough, everything would fade
like the backlight and
I’d be only a woman
Out of time, out of anything
that wouldn’t have lasted,
When I took a plane out East
to a line broken from the horizon
Far enough that the line faded,
I found myself
Fig 3.
Somewhere beloved—
In Piccadilly, as a dishwasher,
In Pavement Butterfly, as a dancer.
I would find myself
in a similar circle,
Placing my faith again in something unknowable—
a cord, a rosary of prayer—
A garden,
a ring of studio lights,
Even when the road was beaten
just the same.
And they told me I wouldn’t survive
looking back past the city of angels
but I was a pillar of salt made
to fill a body that the world was burning away.
Sher Ting Chim is a Singaporean-Chinese writer. She is a Bread Loaf Conference, Kenyon Review and Tin House alumni. She has work published in Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, AGNI, Colorado Review, Salt Hill, The Journal, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection, Burn After Dawn, is published with Landmark Books. She has two poetry chapbooks, Bodies of Separation and The Long-Lasting Grief of Foxes, published with Cathexis Northwest Press and Mouthfeel Press respectively. She tweets at @sherttt and writes at sherting.com.
