Victoria Chang

That darkness is not the absorption of color but the absorption of language.

HORSES

The way their eyes stare,
sometimes I wonder if we
are really hollow inside.

In our house, loud language was everywhere—bundles of Mandarin from Mother’s mouth, Father’s nearly perfect English but Taiwanese-accented Mandarin. Then our Chinglish. But in our house, silence arranged itself like furniture. I was always bumping into it. When unrelated aunties and uncles came over for dinner parties, I envied the laughing as they drank Riunite wine, ate steaming fish and tofu. When they left, they took all the words. What was left after their laughter was always my grief.