Grace Yang
a poem by
Medicine Line
Hour seven and the air tastes
like microwaved eggs. Locked-in
the cabin lights pulse purple
then orange then purple then blue;
the death-throws of a wedding DJ,
spinning one last mambo to seat #5D.
West from Montreal, the medicine line crawls
beneath six madeleines and an empty chair,
a peace offering of pistachio cream
I hope will stay here for a time.
Below, the grid-lights gift small comfort.
There are far too many people, we can’t
have reached Saskatchewan, and,
in their boredom, someone has scratched
“Blame Canada” on the washroom door.
Earlier, the border guard asked if I was crying?
It took me three attempts to understand him,
before I remembered, that I was in Quebec:
“Eh-fever” I lied, in an accent so offensive
that it earned me a strip search.
In dread of our descent, the mambo yields to
a patriotic polka, its people rise like toothpaste
strips of colour: red and white longing
to be rinsed and washed away.
What happens when love tastes like dry mouth?
And acts of service last a moment on the tongue?
What have you become when
all you’ve known are couplets? Reheated
now in Prairie soil with nothing-to-declare.
At the gate, a grandfather in a ten-gallon hat
takes one look at my papers:
“Welcome home, son!” he says.
On ‘The Museum of Modern Art’
Poet’s commentary
I created “The Museum of Modern Art” this past summer, at a time when I was thinking almost constantly about originality. I’d read something I loved and then wonder if I could ever write something that felt completely untouched by what I’d read before. I worried that every idea I had was really just an echo of someone else’s. I wanted, almost desperately, to make something that was mine.
The title came from this impulse to collect and recontextualize. I thought about centos, golden shovels, and the “anxiety of influence”: the fear that we can never fully escape what came before us. Making this poem made me stop wanting to escape it.
I went through literary magazines with scissors, tearing out lines that made me pause. Sometimes it was an image I couldn’t stop thinking about, the shape of a sentence, a strange word, or simply the way a phrase sounded. I wasn’t collecting pieces for any specific story I already had in my head.
I’d move one fragment beside another and suddenly read a connection that hadn’t been there before. I’d rearrange them, change my mind, separate them, put them back. In a way, I was interpreting the poem almost at the same time as I was writing it.
That’s what I love most about found poetry. I have my own interpretation of this poem, but it doesn’t belong to me more than it belongs to the person reading it. I assembled the pieces, but the reader assembles them again. Every person can find a different story in the same words, and none of those stories has to cancel out the others.
I pasted it onto a postcard featuring Henri Matisse’s “Dance (First Version),” one of my favorite paintings. I’ve always loved the way the five figures seem to become a single movement while remaining separate bodies. That idea of movement between individual parts felt connected to what I had made. Each fragment came from somewhere else, but once placed together, they began to dance.
Grace
Yang
(she/her)
Grace Yang is an award-winning writer, poet, and editor whose work explores identity, translation, and the intersections of culture and place. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Digging Press Journal, PETAL Magazine, Taxi Society Magazine, and Evanescent Magazine, among others. She lives in Boston.