Lesbian Loneliness Epidemic
It’s a lonely life when men don’t matter to you. Everything orbits the sun & you’re grief’s moon, untethered from light, dark side, dyke. Your mother once called men the evil you know. The evil you know is always better than the evil you don’t, she said. She once compared your father to cancer. Everyone is saddled with one great misfortune in their life. He is mine. You laughed & asked: in the choice between evils, can I choose to redistribute? Sixteen hours in the future, your two aunts are diagnosed with breast cancer, one in the left breast, the other in the right. They laughed for twin weeks straight. When my aunts announced this to their mother it killed her, says my mother. No mother can survive the idea of her daughter dying before her. But isn’t that what all mothers do, I think, make sure their daughters die the same death, the one that gestates all your life, I watched my mother do the dishes with her back to the door my father threatened us through. When he came back I imagined what he could be carrying: a hammer, a gun, the cracked halves of my mind. All my life I’ve begged her turn around, turn around. In every room I face the door. I twist my breast like a bronze knob & open my chest of trinket treatises. Promises I made to the girls at school: best friends forever, you’ll be my maid of honor which I thought was like a servant, a knight pledging on one knee to serve her queen. I’ll be your sword & steed, I’ll be your need your need. Wrestling on the grass I broke a girl’s back. She shattered my skull into pieces so even they paired off & married their edges into a new continent, faceted fishbowl to cap my headless neck. The class pet a parakeet that fell in love with its reflection in the little toy mirror. It vomited onto its own reflection to feed it. It fell in love, again, with the pillar of vomit that had grown to its size. I vomit my girlhood friends & beg them to let me. Let me be yours forever, for real they laugh & say it’s time to get up & grow up. We practiced walking down the aisle, not tripping on the edges of our pretend gowns. Imagine walking with an inflated ball between your knees. Teach me a skinless shimmy. There was a game where you’d bounce a hard ball off the blacktop & watch how high it could go. The game was how fast you could get out of its way. We scattered, emptied our shadows as it hurtled back to earth. We shrieking before the meteor of extinction. Look up. Stay still. Open your mouth & basket that. In the second of obliteration, your back to the door, your back to your life, you won’t wish to survive. You want to die with the world you know. You won’t. The ball suspends like a sun. Your mother says: in life you get one misfortune, but you also get one miracle. You won’t know it while you’re alive. Somehow I know you’re mine. The parakeet flew away one day, abandoned its column of vomit. Its hunger double. The fear is this: what happiness is worth being stranded inside it? My mother stayed. I vomited a lover in the cage. I kissed its face & left to watch its death from afar. To be assured of its suffering. I know what I know won’t free me. What I don’t is my only life.
K-Ming Chang is a Lambda Literary Award winner, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, a Kundiman Fellow, and an O. Henry Prize Winner. She is the author of the novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was shortlisted for the Faulkner Award and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the Otherwise Award. Her most recent books are ORGAN MEATS (One World, 2023) and a novella titled CECILIA (Coffee House Press, 2024). Her next novel for adults, NEEDLEMOUTH, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster on October 20, 2026. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.
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