DEATH BY HANGING
EMILY LIU
after Nagisa ÅŒshima*
I didn’t die
when I was supposed to. My bones
​
slipped from their ropes, dreamed
their way back under the ash
​
of the pear trees on the school-
yard roof where the first sin
​
occurred. Should I feel shame?
Should I remember my crime? Come
​
morning, last night’s notions of return
are absurd. Extant somewhere outside
​
of physical space—not knowing where you are
in the empire, not knowing where you are
​
in the body—I know the only thing a human
should be scared of is living
​
where they’re not supposed to. Although my feet swung
below the trapdoor, although I almost fainted
​
from my painful heart. I want to tell you:
a poem decolonizes nothing.
​
There are four walls to a prison.
There are two borders to a country.
​
Still. You cannot run away from your body.
A body cannot run away from the consciousness
​
that has settled in like the strangled embrace of a mother.
​
REGARDING FILM
Here, there is no way to exit
without stripping naked. Shot of
the river, like a woman’s waist. How many
have died? How far apart should the fake bones
be? Don’t show anything on the ground
that might be alive! I heard there was a human
market. Translation: the viewer knows now
the magnitude of what is lost by what is
not shown (the academic says).
This way, is the violence really remembered?
Pulling red from red like water spinning
at the bottom of a dyed bowl. The body
of war reanimates on the museum display.
Meaning: let’s put it somewhere the people
won’t see.
Emily Liu is a student from the Chicago area. Their most recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Feral, and The Phoenix, and their work has received recognition from the International Hippocrates Young Poets Prize, Pfeiffer University, Poetry Society, and Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, among others.
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