SINOPHONIA

after Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Tiffany Tang, United States

Porcelain, smoke, swans snapped at the throat; every boy I trusted was a broker. Every broker I met bet I could profit from poetry—naming what wounds me, writing fracture into filigree. Feel me rupture from my patterns and onto the page? I’m caught in cobalt the color of catastrophe. Apostrophe: preaching to the pottery prized by my grandmother, whose grandmother taught her to treat tears as treasure, theft as trade, and girls as ghouls, ferocious and so inexplicably fine.

*

By evening, I unload and learn a language of palms. I practice balancing teacups on the tear of my throat, the territory chiseled yet unchipped by time. I am cargo, chimera, customs officer: a woman who spits out tea steam, each cloud the size of a country. Borders sewn above my eyes.

Gilded handles lining the lids. The lacrimal bones are hostels. Heirlooms, wicked by the West

Wing’s curator; he frames the prey, warrants her predator.

*

At the gift shop, a man asks if I’m authentic. He points to my flesh, ponders finding white in the wild—as if finding were not a verb that claims. As if my blue, my bruises would behave. I think not: by closing, I have imagined each of the little women dotting my spine, soft sleeves slipping past their arms. Their mouths are gaps, impossible angles; nothing enters and exits unchanged. Behind them hides a hunter, the paddy protecting his musket, his minutes as he waits. Weeks later, the scene’ll become collectible. Slippery and alive with the wonders of this world. In it, I am a fixed-smile figure. My hands hot and heaven-heavy. They hold nothing.

*

My mother warns me of warehouses. Worse is when they’re empty, unfulfilled by the allure of production. The allure of destruction: woman as transaction, beautiful enough to burn. The allure of reduction: every edge slices the same. There i