Gift

By Jennifer Wong

''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.'

Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999)

First it is just a measling of the tablecloth

but soon it spills

in all colours, all gaiety:

desk floor lamp flowers

tatami, my underwear

then dares to paw across

Mother’s face, so

smilingdelirious.

Twenty years

in a twelve square metre room

with the thuds of tennis balls

the only music

tells me

that suffering

is necessary

and more powerful

than healing

and I wish

to cover all territory

for once—hospital beds, chinaware,

bed linen, your bland skin

with the pattern and fear of all my dots—

by the old wharf on Naoshima

I make my yellow wartime pumpkins.

I know my home is not a country anymore,

just a festering colony of the mind:

these shuddering trees

that come and talk to me each night,

the whispers of the white nurses

and the star-dances

of my Japanese kaleidoscope.

Come haunt me still. Do what you may.

I won’t return. I’m not afraid.

Copyright Credit: Jennifer Wong, "Gift" from Goldfish. Copyright © 2013 by Jennifer Wong. Reprinted by permission of Chameleon Press and the author.