"Hemlock, 1956" – Victoria Chang's poem on love and loss

Full text

A wooden door in front of everything. A door

on my country. A door in the lake. My poems

prefer wooden hunting dogs. If I say there is a

door on my heart in the poem, then there is.

Now I can open this door. The door is a short

door 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 that

her 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 the

aorta. 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 look

right through it. I promise her that I will try to love

someone as much as I love her, so she doesn’t

spend her death alone. She hands me a Tupperware

with rice and bok choy to give to my father. I cat

the food because he must be in someone else’s

heart. Next to a fetus. I am lost in my own heart

now. 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