Fragrant Maiden battles a British warship
Kristin Chang
Fragrant Maiden is the literal translation of Shi Xianggu, more commonly known as Ching Shih (Ching’s widow). She was the infamous pirate queen of the late 19th century, feared by the British, Portuguese, and Qing Dynasty’s navies. Formerly a sex worker in British-occupied Canton, she was kidnapped by pirates, married twice, and eventually led the largest pirate fleet in history, terrorizing European colonial trading forces and the late Chinese empire. She is one of the few pirates to retire peacefully.
I hole your ship o white man my mantelpiece
of skulls I sip from the sea like your weak
British tea call me whore and I’ll braid my hair
around your neck like a leash call me bitch
and I dismember your ship I knock you back
to sea I ship your bones home
I make every white woman a widow I
bride the sea I rock my boats to sleep
I seasick you I sic the sea on you
I have so many men I burn them like logs
I warm my hands in your blood carry your spine
a cutlass I lass I wear my cuts like a coat of armor
you dare army me I make meat of your land
I teethe your coasts crass I candle you
let the fire read your flesh out loud I smoke
you into yearlong highs I opium your sleep slurred
you came
in your sleep every night as a boy dreaming
yourself inside my body I hunger
whole you hunger into me a hole
when you bend to drink thirst is the shap of your own face lapping itself I lap you
in the water shark-circle you sunk I come to eat
the after I spit your bones ashore
my teeth brightened by your white meat
don’t bet your body against my many
lives don’t you see every sea is mine to man
Fragrant Maiden captures Angel Island
america says islands make the best prisons
so I capture them all alcatraz ellis
angel I rip the wings off seagulls
rain of blood reign of white feathers
to enter the underworld I hear they weigh
your heart against a feather to enter
america I hear they weigh your penis
against a pigeon o chink what chance
do you have against white coats
doctors unzipping your anus empty
they starve you shitless o immigrant
the sea sells your body to the nearest
coast the country cells you in the nearest
mouth they count your teeth scan your blood
for signs of riot rot off your bones
I’ll take you home all the gold
you were promised is here on my boat
I corner kings loot crowns like carrion I felled
a war fleet trussed them in my own hair trust
me I sieged the sea til it surrendered sank
itself america I capture this island
I ransom this angel now your god must pay
Fragrant Maiden learns a marine
is either a soldier or a science
in your textbooks I have many names: mammal
blowhole swallower of seas
I name my children after every army
from shanghai to qinghai: france britain germany
america japan I teach fish to lay eggs in my mouth
my body a school a swimming feast
I learned to make love to whales sea
urchins my father finned me with his own
hands held me by the hair every night
I begged our boat to betray us to touch
the bottom of the ocean like the back of my throat
tender with wounds I learned land
like a second language taught my legs to bow
before bow legged men we were all fish once
choking on hooks of air my blood is the ink
of squids my eyes black eel farms when the british
came they called us seafood cracked our mouths
open like clams my soldier was bearded a redhead
so my blood never showed I scraped the freckles
from his face believing they were stars to guide
me back to sea believing a god could be read
from the sky bruised past blue
science says certain sounds can only be heard
in water for instance my name my dead
children he drowned tucked nightly into the sea
each time I was pregnant I grew a tail for water
birth he fed air to my gills so I’d never leave
so the sea came to me instead I gave birth to it
I pulled the flood through his body like thread
through a needle’s eye
Kristin Changlives in NY and reads for Winter Tangerine. Her work has been anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3 and Ink Knows No Borders. She is the recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and Resist/Recycle/Regenerate fellowship with the Wing On Wo Project in Manhattan Chinatown, where she helped teach paper-making workshops as community building. Her debut chapbook “Past Lives, Future Bodies” is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (October 2018).