Yuxi Lin
Yuxi Lin is a Chinese American writer, AAWW Margins Fellow, and winner of the Breakout 8 Writers Prize. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, The Washington Post, The Southern Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She has received support from Millay Colony for the Arts and the Djerassi Residency. Yuxi graduated magna cum laude from Davidson College and received her MFA from New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. She lives and teaches in New York. Source
I Used to Pray
to any God that made me
feel ashamed.
Girls are takers,
Mama used to say.
I took every lesson
she gave me, learned
to swim out of my body
& abandon it.
With incense I burned pages
until a perfect eye stared back.
God drilled a hole to make us see.
See? Mine is filthy.
He, too, eyed me
each day afterschool,
clutching the line to the lure.
When I walked by
he’d catch me & groan
Oh you’ve grown so heavy.
Like his breath, his fingers
were meaty & thick.
For years I weighed myself
then I weighed myself down.
In the water, my scaled body
lay bent & murky.
Listen — Don’t believe in God
unless he admits
he was always watching.
Look back at him.
If he had my courage
he’d choose to be born
a daughter.
What am I begging for?
I have two mouths.
One remembers.
Neither forgives.
Published:
2020
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
Themes:
Body & Body Image
Faith & Hope
Family
Memory & The Past
Womanhood
Literary Devices:
Anadiplosis
A device in which the last word or phrase of one clause, sentence, or line is repeated at the beginning of the next.
Bleeding Title
when the title of a poem acts as the first line
Couplets
two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Rhetorical Question
a question asked for effect, not necessarily to be answered