Anthea Yang
Anthea Yang is a writer and poet living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Her writing has appeared in Going Down Swinging, Kill Your Darlings, Voiceworks and the HEIDE+Rabbit House of Ideas: Modern Women anthology, among others. She has been longlisted for the 2021 Kuracca Prize for Australian Literature, shortlisted for the 2020 Dorothy Porter Award for Poetry, and has performed her poetry as part of Emerging Writers’ Festival, Melbourne Writers Festival, and Red Room Poetry’s 2022 Victorian Poetry Month Gala. Born in Perth, Western Australia, her favourite season is summer.
Onward
i do not know how this ends
except there is a line drawn between me
and my body / me and
the person sitting next to me on the train / me and
everyone i have ever loved deeply /
a line between me
and the place where i am hungry to be
my memory is desiring linearity
remembers touch as an unripened mango, firm except a thumb-shaped bruise touching the surface / soft but unclear of the cause
perhaps what i am trying to trace is a lineage
perhaps what i am always trying to find is a line
let me try one more time:
memory is reaching / is waking to
the moonlight casting a patchwork of shadows
on my throat / i wonder
how much language i am losing / every day
a character learned now missing a stroke
until i am left with just the beginning / 一
the first stroke from left to right: a horizon
one late afternoon i watch the sun blow through
a lineage of trees, casting a shadow
on the building opposite my balcony
and i think about how the word 梦 is made up of
a forest sitting above the evening / how this is a dream
of my real life / this landscape
where I am standing on a mountaintop watching time settle
comfortably into the horizon as if it has done so before / here
my body melts into the shadows and here / in the poem
in the archives / in the memory
i am in abundance.