MOTH ER
I stuffed the good wool into my gut. Unrolled my mouth like a rug, sucked the softest tendrils like
a lover. Did you watch me, my little larvae lamp? A flying moth throws itself into a fire, I used to say in
the old country. Be tied to mother’s apron wings, I say to you in the new country. You mimic back,
pulse the warm slime inside you. Be tied, you slick. To fire, you stew. No, no, I whack my wings against
your too soft body. You flinch, curl your tiny legs to counter. Stupid grub! Don’t go toward
light, don’t go toward fire, I spit. Children simply don’t listen. Sometimes, I get so tired repeating
myself. Sometimes, I get so tired of eating. Guzzling cashmere can really run a body poor.
Sometimes, I forget that I, too, am I child. I want to sleep. I want to cry. I want to grub myself
inside out, greedy. Instead, I sip hair left on the floor, perpetual pasta piles. Instead, I keep carving
a canyon no one will name. Instead, someone will kill me, will put out this infestation of moth
ers for good. The killer will look a lot like me. Will even weep a beam of liquid light before
crushing me under her meaty palm. Every family has something to kill, she will say. The killer won’t be
wrong. For centuries, my eyes will keep dripping felted fiber, a thousand times over and over.
Promise you’ll look for me, my little larvae loop? Just look at all these loose threads everywhere –
THE ANTS
The ants, flicking and kicking, the ants again. The ants coming up from the floorboards, gaps
everywhere in this wood worn house. Or maybe coming up from nowhere at all, little hungry ghosts,
powerlifting apples, sweet potatoes, their nectar-filled dead. The ants boring holes into apples in the
fruit bowl, construction in the gala. Sticky sugar legs dangling out, not a
stem, a leg. Kissing the moonscape of an orange, not an army, not a colony, but a family on holiday.
The ants, they took down the sweet potatoes, gnawing back and forth with their mandibles, their
dovetail saws, bright orange mush crowns. I sliced off the gnawed parts and baked the sweet potatoes
anyway and thought of my grandmother and the curl of her white hair singing above her brow. I
poured sesame oil on them, glimmering hot pearls. They were delicious, steaming. My mouth huffed
out smoke like a hot spring. I found some ants in a bowl of ground cumin by the stove, spice slapped
a slump of death, still more. Found them circling the sink drain’s
perimeter, chewing on hair, toothpaste, some honeyed, lonely spit. These are huge ants, not what
you imagine when I say the word “ant.” Ants large enough that I can feel their bodies fall apart –
armor clanging off one by one – when I kill them with a napkin. It feels medieval, I hate to say. To
press their bodies down like that. I don’t want to replicate what has been done to me. To be frank.
Lungs flattened have a hard time filling back up. I don’t want to kill the
ants, so I flick them away most of the time. Flying across the room, somersaulting in humid hot pot
air, landing someplace closer to the heart than I know. It’s not much better, I know
that. I watch the ants carry their dead, stacked like bunk beds. I watch them carry other dead insects,
my dead skin, anything that needs just a bit more breath. I watch
them do nothing sometimes. Just standing there with their compound eye, smelling. I hate them, I
love them. I admire their power. Tell me how you got to be this powerful. In the middle of the night,
there’s an unexplained bite along my clavicle, throbbing gala rash, then in the morning, the wound:
gone.
A Conversation with Jane Wong: The Creature Feature
Jannah Hinthorne
Many of your poems and prose pieces feature identity, food, and family, which these poems do as well, but they also linger lovingly around the creature – both the gruesome and delightful aspects. Your poems hold such tender space for the insect, not shying away from disgust and destruction, but embracing it and letting the delight ooze in your descriptive language. Can you share a little bit about how you use insects to fuse the gruesome, the painful, and the delightful? What do insects have to teach us – particularly in our current political moment?
Jane Wong
I’ve always been attracted to insects or creatures that we often overlook or dislike because of their “destruction.” I grew up in a restaurant and I found myself attracted to cockroaches and mosquitoes and all these creatures that got in people’s way. I think the core of why I love insects and why they keep showing up in my poems is their tie to disgust. I’m always curious about who we find “disgusting” in terms of identity. Chinese restaurants are often described in terms of whether or not they are clean or dirty. I find that really interesting.
This idea of disgust shows up in a lot of my work. I’m curious about what it means to create tenderness around these creatures. In “Moth er,” I am curious about what it means for us to view the moth as causing destruction – such as eating away at the threads of a cashmere sweater. I wanted to tie that to motherhood: the labor of mothers and how they are often seen as vile in their exhaustion. Our culture views the mother as grotesque as much as she is also put on a pedestal. I keep returning to H.D.'s poems, particularly this one line in the trilogy “The Walls Do Not Fall” where the speaker becomes a worm. The worm speaker declares “I profit by every calamity; / I eat my way out of it.”
I sometimes feel like an insect. I think, “You think so little of me, but I am a multitude and a part of this central ecosysem.” There’s a bravado to think about how fundamental and overlooked worms are. I’ve dreamed of making a children’s book about the insects that get squashed, or cut in half by accident, or ants getting squished by someone’s finger. Each squashed insect gets their own poem: a little ode, a resurrection. It’s kind of a morbid children’s book, but I think children are morbid, so it might work.
Jannah Hinthorne
I’m always blown away by how tender your poems are. They leave me with renewed excitement to feast on the world with curiosity. And of course, tenderness isn’t only for delight, but also for the distressing, the traumatic, and the slow sink into grief. Do you have a tenderness-attuning practice for your poetry and prose? How do you think tenderness can assist both readers and writers? What is made possible by tenderness?
Jane Wong
Tenderness, tending to, or tenderizing is very much an action or an activation. You have to put a practice into motion in order to make something tender. For me, that activation is trying to train how I feel through the world, which is hard to do when so much of the world is awful and exhausting and I want to dissociate from everything. Tenderness is a particular kind of looking.
Tenderness is also staying with something longer than you think you should. To look at it and to think, “Wow, it’s so incredible that the slime of a slug can glisten like that and have that viscosity.” I think that is included in what it means to be tender – tending to things that scare you or make you feel comfortable or uneasy. For example, my grandma gets free groceries because of this amazing nonprofit that helps a lot of Chinese elders, but she can’t eat all the food. When I go to my grandma’s house, I often notice little fruit flies flying around her apartment. At first, it’s something that made me feel disgust. But I try to stop and question that disgust: “Where is that coming from? Why would I feel disgust that these fruits are rotting?” Applying tenderness, I transform that image into the flies creating a crown, a safety net around the fruit. I think you can tenderize any image to create a different perspective on things that might be otherwise terrifying or scary in our lives. To me, tenderness is an act that takes practice. If you don’t notice small details and ask questions, you can go through life just answering emails. I have no idea how to tenderize an email.
Jannah Hinthorne
Both “The Ants” and “Moth er” seem to be interested in exploring violence toward insects and passive destruction caused by insect hunger, necessity, and at times their sheer excess. In “The Ants,” the speaker mingles their hatred with a loving awe of their power, avoiding killing them because, “I don’t want to replicate what has been done to me,” However, the moth killer says, “Every family has something to kill.” Could you say more about these lines? How do we live with what takes from us? What do insects have to teach us about our own bodies and the webs that connect us?
Jane Wong
I was just teaching and re-reading Ross Gay’s essay, “Some Thoughts on Mercy.” At the end of that essay he talks about bees and being. He references the potential fear of them – of being stung, the swarm, the intensity of the sound they make, and the multitude of them. He wonders how to get rid of the bees: should he douse them with gasoline? Can he let his fear in? Anytime we get closer to the things we are afraid of, we have to ask ourselves how we can give ourselves some of that tenderizing. We have to ask ourselves, “What is this thing that scares me?”
In moments in poems like “The Ants,” there is a deep frustration and fear that the insects are going to take over a house or space. The idea of infestation really interests me and shows up a lot in my work. Infestation carries the feeling that you cannot go back or return to a previous state– you’ve been infested. In “The Ants,” there are hints of domestic partner violence and what has been done to me. The vulnerable feeling that someone could just squish you – which connects to that larger question about where we are politically right now. It’s easy to feel helpless, like a squishable ant. But in looking at the ants in that poem, there’s an imbuing of a royal curiosity. Ants have such a deep network of strength and they must feel such exhaustion in terms of all the labor that they do. When we use terms like “army of ants,” we put our definition of empire on them, and that’s not them. They didn’t create that colonized idea! I think there is absolutely a repulsion to what the ants do in the poem – eating bits of my hair and whatnot – but also a respect for their strength and even envy. Why can’t I be that strong? Despite their strength, however, they can be so easily killed – it’s both/and all the time.
The same thing happens in “Moth er” too – the infestation of moths eat everything. But the mother moth tries to give her grub tough life advice, even in the short period of time they have to live. There’s both an absurdity and some melancholy in that: that they’re going to die. It’s just going to happen like that. What do we do with each precious life?
Jannah Hinthorne
You’ve been writing more prose recently with the publication of your beautiful memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City. How does writing prose shape your poetry – especially your prose poems? On a similar note, how does ceramic-making – and other tactile art forms – inform your poetic process?
Jane Wong
I think I’ve always blurred the lines of what “making” is. I’m more intrigued by the process of things than I am with what it turns out to be. Prose was what I first started writing circa 2007, so it’s been a chunk of time since I returned to that, at least in fictional form. “Moth er” is as much flash fiction as it is a prose poem, and “The Ants” also serves as a sort of creative nonfiction essay.
Prose allows me to sit a little longer. I’ve always loved the bouillon-cube-intensity of poems. I love when a short poem has the capacity to continue expanding like a sponge in water. In prose, I find myself able to flail a little bit more and dig into weirder spaces when I elongate more and more, to the point where it feels like one giant breath. It’s hard for me sometimes when I write fiction or memoir to be minimalist. There is a maximalist quality about me always, no matter what I’m making. In prose I feel like I can really go big. There’s a length to my ceramics-making, too. It takes a long time to create a vessel or an object. You have to make the thing, fire it, glaze it, and fire it again. Sometimes it takes weeks to make something.
The idea of sitting with something longer has been on my mind. Maybe it’s because I’m aging. I want to slow down and sit with things longer, whereas I can write a poem in five minutes and be like, “That’s good, that’s it.” Sometimes in prose I have to sit there and dig into the architecture of the piece a bit more. But at the end of the day, it’s all the same Jane that’s in all of it. That’s been the most magical for me. No matter what kind of thing I’m making, it’s still a core part of the process of expression. And the expression is all the same. No matter what medium I choose, it’s still about the same obsessions, and I have to embrace that. A lot of people choose a different medium to get away from their obsession, and it never works. It’s still going to be the same obsession. Even with ceramics, I wonder: why can’t I just make a mug? Why am I making fruits and food? But of course I am.
Jannah Hinthorne
Finally, just for fun, can you tell me about an encounter with a spring creature you’ve had recently?
Jane Wong
I always feel like I’m encountering a lot of animals in so many different ways. But in terms of spring, the other day I was wandering through the Kubota Gardens down south. I knew there was a turtle there. I remembered seeing a turtle when I was there a couple of years earlier. I had to see this turtle. When I got there, I didn’t see it and I was deeply disappointed. I was like, “Dang, that’s what I wanted to see today.” It wasn’t that sunny and I knew that turtles come out in the sun. Why did I want to see the turtle so badly? There were so many other beautiful things blooming. Right when I was about to leave that one area, it was just there! It had been there the whole damn time while I was looking, but suddenly it just appeared before me! It wasn’t camouflaged or anything, it was just there. It was sunning itself with its neck pulled up to the sky, even though it was a cloudy day. It didn’t move, it was just doing its thing. I remember thinking, "I need to just go and sit with this turtle.” So I went over and sat with this turtle for a while. I kept thinking about how it just doesn’t care that I was there. It was entirely in its own world. I was deeply moved by the fact that it did not move. I want to carry that turtle-like energy into spring with me. I probably stayed there way too long, just being with this creature who did not care.
Issue 114: Contributors