Coping Mechanisms

By Natalie Wee

Issue 40 • Fall 2019 • Poetry

1st Place Poetry

2019 Summer Contest

A poem for me is a field; it is an experience of language through image and sound. “Coping Mechanisms” feels like it was written to ‘carve a doorway.’ I felt like even I ‘tried to hold without creasing / the light inside of it.’ The poem is able to create a new emotion energized by striking imagery and close attention to sound. For me, this poem is a field, it’s an experience, a sky-split-by-hot-yolk wonder.

– Jake Skeets

I am young & want to leave: so I touch myself all day,

broth salt from bone & water.

It’s a fact orgasm is closest

to death without dying. I blood

my nails & cannibal my body

feet first, carve a doorway

to walk through & name it

a bruise of family albums.

A man turns into a rusted gate: his wife gardens her blood,

ribbons velvet tree rings for years.

Her ankles bloom two birds,

instruments of wind & song

to hunt what lies out of reach

like a field of stars in a photograph

I once tried to hold without creasing

the light inside it.

Name a woman & a daughter: will answer. The mother

of my mother lived by bent knee

& bleach, foretold my father’s hands

& the bedrooms his mistress touched

into museums of yellowed light.

A moon split the sky with hot yolk

when I was born, prophesized

a season of waste, the mother

swollen with weeping & years.

I know. I know my mother

could not leave because I arrived

Natalie Wee

Natalie Wee is a queer Peranakan community-builder. She has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Anthology. Born in Singapore to Malaysian parents, she is currently a settler in Tkaronto (Toronto).