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| Jenny Zhang in her New York apartment. Photograph: Christopher Lane |
I liked the story of the monkey
who was inside
that woman and when she met
that man
who fucked her without asking
about pain or pleasure or desire or terror
he was really fucking
the monkey inside her
who told her to stop
if only we all had a monkey
but actually ~ no ~
no to wanting someone else
to do the work for us
no to wanting someone to feel
our pain
no to thinking everything can be
outsourced
someone has to feel it
it might as well be me
just because I have let monsters
love me shouldn’t mean I get to
hit whoever I want
and ~ yes ~ I want to hit everyone!
walk around with my fists by my side
like a spring I knock down everything
around me
the horror is always the same:
what fell were the flowers
leaving just the ragged hedges
the immovable trunks of trees
everything ugly remains
the bleeding is just on one side
the same people care
and the same people don’t
I don’t know man . . . was I wrong
to assume I was straight?
what else was in me all along that I never nurtured?
I point out sadist after sadist
but don’t know how to look at myself
well all around us are people who don’t know
until someone calls for a boycott
and someone else with no disposable income
promises publicly they won’t spend it
~
I honestly don’t know
how to scare the fuck out of him—
he has too much money to care
it sucks that even white girls can’t get justice
and the rest of us are supposed to keep writing
about the time someone put their hand up our legs
the time someone put something else up something else
it’s just holes it’s just ugly appendages
it’s just an orifice
it’s just someone’s entire history of violence
it’s just going dead inside for one to seven minutes
it’s just sleeping in unwanted sperm
it’s just someone’s parent who knows their son
& he would never never hurt anyone
it’s just marrying someone who has offshore accounts
in the Seychelles and using bitcoins to buy more land in Puerto Rico
it’s just writing on instagram: “best decision I ever made
marrying this one”
now no one is afraid to get drinks with “this one”
he’s “safe” because he married a nerd who thinks
she’s a 19th century aristocrat
everyone with secret wealth
publicly fetishizes rich people’s ideas of thrift
it sucks I’m too violent to be praised
by actually powerful people
they prefer the dummies who feel
sorry for all the Roman Polanski films
they can’t stream anymore
on moral grounds
they’ll only retweet that article about
how women are monsters too
I mean get fucking real
did someone with this level of professional achievement
actually agonize for three weeks
over watching that scene in Annie Hall
where Diane Keaton cucks Woody Allen
so gracefully and deceptively?
I once saw a group of future
Men Going Their Own Ways
actually praise the movie as if it weren’t
the nightmare they wrote their manifestos against
~
#goals for a white supremacy that outlaws
any dick stiffening outside a vagina
the followers of thor’s hammer can’t get enough
of these sideways asian cunts
they worship odin
but can’t get hard unless there’s a chink around
I guess it’s true women are so powerful
that a single drop of cum landing anywhere
but inside our wombs would destroy western civ
can anyone resolve then how
a single drop of unwanted cum
can make my friends and I actual survivors?
I would never call myself a survivor
just because that skinny little pencil dick
went in and then fell out
~ too skinny ~ I screamed
it hurts all the more
thanks to all the unused surface area
how did both of us come away from that
thinking each other was the nazi
~
when I was fourteen I actually prayed
for someone to rape me
how was I supposed to know
what that word meant
how it would actually feel
it was the fastest route to attention
all the other ways I was broken
didn’t ~ count ~
how was I supposed to know
nothing counts if you’re a woman in pain
how was I supposed to know
the more I talk about my pain
the more white people literally profit
how was I supposed to know then
I was already eroticizing my trauma
in order to seem luckier than the girls I knew
who talked in terms of disfigurement
are there any women left
who haven’t cried on tape?
every time I say something
a man I’ve never thought about even once in my life
lets me know how it makes him feel
this is one of the best strategies
to get me to think about you
what a fucking prison it is
to be inside this femme mind
I wish it could end right here
but actually pessimism is more than sane
this body has never been touched consensually
are you kidding me???
exploitation doesn’t stop just because
I started doing mad push-ups
and worked on my core
I hate this reality but neither
will I just die
I will live okay
I will bite my tongue until it’s gone
not to make any kind of point
though it is true one way
to seize the means of production
might be self-mutilation
might be suicide without a note
no warnings on facebook
no threats on twitter
just go away
let the paper write an obituary
for someone who resembles you
the dead don’t laugh
they don’t applaud heroic acts
they don’t have unfinished business
they aren’t salvation for the living
they are dead dead dead
& deserve
at least
some rest
Jenny Zhang was born in Shanghai and grew up in New York. She is the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and the story collection Sour Heart.
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