High Noon Reclamation, and: Untitled 2 Ate Untitled 1

Abstract

High Noon Reclamation, and: Untitled 2 Ate Untitled 1 Tania Chen (bio) High Noon Reclamation Your loneliness is a long-term project. You sit with it, stones in your mouth; edge to edge, front to back, the light on the wall creeps. You replace the stones with musical notes and your family memory resides in a distant country (—the memory waking old aches that belong to your great-grandfather and the war wounds he brought with him across the sea). Your great-grandmother kept washing old clothes until they were all brightly bleached (—you don't remember her face, just her hands: calloused and worked to the bone). Your grandparents, your parents, they were just tests, a way of setting the ground (—but you, you are different. Meant to be so much better, meant to fit in under the bright noon sun). There is no place to hide the inadequacy of your being, too much and too little by any rule you're measured with. Your parents have given too much to fit in (—they hope, as their parents did before, that you are shaped correctly enough to make this). Your mouth knows how to pronounce all the words your grandmother stumbled on. The words your great-grandmother never bothered to learn (—in return you've given up the voice of your ancestors — the language feels awkward in you). [End Page 65] UNTITLED 2 ATE UNTITLED 1 My insides are glossy ceramic smooth and deep red, an eternal Chinese New Year that holds my memories trapped in that single moment. The ribs are paper-mâché, a cave-in at the slightest pressure; the heart a chrysanthemum nestled at the left-center; liver, stomach, and kidneys the shape of oval jade, protruding slightly when I inhale. The New Horizon spacecraft measures the blackness of space, subtracts known sources of light. In the same way, I slip a hand down my throat to measure the darkness inside. I dreamt of constellations swimming within, was told there are no horizons in space: only the inky black, billions of stars already dead thousands of light-years away. [End Page 66] Tania Chen Tania Chen is a Chinese-Mexican queer writer. Their work has been published in Unfettered Hexes by Neon Hemlock, they are a first reader for Strange Horizons and Nightmare Magazine and a graduate of the Clarion West Novella Bootcamp workshop of January/Feb 2021. Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press