Waxwing Literary Journal: American writers & international voices.

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Syzygy

Monica Ong

Image: a scanned page from a book reading: Syzygy. A map of my estrangement. Under a technical drawing of an ecslipse reads: Fig. 1 — Total Eclipse of the Sun. When is a sun no longer a sun? We look up and no longer recognize our kin. Bloodlines severed by a single vote. How easily stories get fastened onto bodies. How black they bleed against— Under another technical drawing of an eclipse reads: Fig. 2 — Annular Eclipse of the Sun. I place banana leaves onto my grandma's lids. My piety thin as pressed flowers. The sun is pushing us all outside our encasings. Closer to sky. Under a third technical drawing reads: Fig. 3 — Partial eclipse of the sun. When is a daughter no longer a daughter? Penumbra, a finger touched eye. We live entire worlds beyond a mother's periphery. Without dianosis, hers is a path of totality. We just want to be seen. Under the final technical drawing of an eclipse reads: Fig. 4 — Total Eclipse of the Moon. My rooms are filled with your darkness, empty and unkempt. The umbra's edge. Anywhere I look is light relfected. A knife that never touches you.

about the author

Monica Ong

Monica Ong is the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry. An MFA graduate in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, she has also been awarded fellowships at Kundiman, Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Based in Connecticut, she currently serves as the User Experience Designer at the Yale Digital Humanities Lab.

Other works by Monica Ong

Woman's Place in the Universe
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