MICHELLE QIAO Spoken Word | Leland High School, San Jose, CA
There is No Prayer for You, Chang'e The goddess Chang’e flies to the Moon as her husband shoots down nine suns in pursuit.
Most of the time, she sleeps tethered to the Moon Man’s cheekbone— look up, and imagine her eyes born addicted to the man that binds her feet and tightens her tongue and whitens her skin until she cannot move until she cannot speak until her face snaps into the dust, swallowed so deeply Neil Armstrong steps on her ring finger. Buzz Aldrin her face. Luna-9 misses her hair by half a leg. Her husband sits on Mars and tosses her a mooncake, drinking rice wine from a clay pot. His temples thank him for Earth’s one Sun but there is no prayer for you, Chang’e. Only cake. He gives her a rabbit for company. It pounds the elixir of immortality in a mortar, gives it to her to drink, pleading live another day! she replies: to eat another cake. My grandmother bought me that rabbit, a little plastic one I dragged around on a string. She paints the black eyes back on when they chip, ties the whiskers for me when they tangle tells me to keep it close— I lose it. She says it must have slipped back to the moon tells me to look out for it just in case it ever decides to fall all the way back down. Before the one child policy packed up my missing aunts and missing uncles my grandmother’s mother had too many children. She’s less than five feet, body thin sent in a basket to an English orphanage growing up already settling in the silt between waking up in her bed or a casket, trying to find faith in the empty bottoms of bowls— I'm alive, which tells me that miracles happen. Her mother took her back boiled one more cup of water in their rice to raise her. She didn’t graduate the tenth grade which tells me her father said why educate a girl when an education can’t feed her. I look up at the moon and ask Chang’e why she doesn’t throw down cake when she has seen my grandmother starving and she tells me that sometimes it is better to starve than to be forced to eat.
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I like to imagine she tugs her heart by the bones of her hand my rabbit at her heel and plunges in, snaps the strings in half cranks open his third eye to spit a mouthful in his face, saying Don’t give me cake get down on your knees and pray.
