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Woman’s Place in the Universe

Monica Ong

Image: a scanned page from a book. The top reads: Woman’s Place in the Universe. Are you not convinced Daughters can also be heroic? — Wang Zhenyi (1768–1797) Underneath is a drawing of the Milky Way. Underneath are four paragraphs, which read: Odd number. Odd girl. One is an observation. The other, a polite indictment. She preferred to arrange her studio against the laws of symmetry, her way of saying up yours to Confucius and his man-pandering precepts. No matching pillows, tilted walls, her father’s books all perfect bound yet bent like a wormwood granny’s feet. 

Imagine a woman’s calculations opening up the sky, the sun’s orbit but a mole on the lip of a solar clustered nipple. How she spilled milk from the glass of her astronomer eye knowing it would feed another hunger in another womb of time. 

Mathematics were just foreplay. There is nothing wrong with being easy. Any man can scribble odes to flatter a goddess of the moon. She turned her garden into a laboratory to decipher the secret turning of the stars. Behind the ecliptic strung up crystal, she glimpsed her face in the lunar gleam. 

Infinite planets.Her endless ether. There are those whose greatness grows in shadow, whose outer limits the spotting of blood cannot contain.

 

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Monica Ong

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


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