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Home > April Lit: "Projector" by Cathy Linh Che

April Lit: "Projector" by Cathy Linh Che

Cathy Linh Che - April 7, 2014

Image by Petr Kratochvil [1]

Cathy Linh Che's poem "Projector" is a quiet, tense poem that captures the helplessness of a child forced into an adult situation. The poem is painful in its sparseness and heartbreaking in its untold brutality.

The poem is part of Che's forthcoming collection 'Split' [2], available from Alice James Books on April 29th.

-- Karissa Chen, Fiction & Poetry Editor

 


 

While I slept, my cousin placed
his mother’s mask on me,
asked me if I loved him. 

He wore wolf ears.
I willed him to hear the change
in atmosphere, the tilt of air 

—no, no, no—

his finger slid
under the white
underwear. 

The air was cool,
my face on fire. 

I wore my woman’s mask.
Underneath,
I was ten years old. 

When he kissed me, the edges
of our magnetic fields touched.
Inside, my heart compressed 

into a black hole.

Categories: 
Poetry [3]
Tags: 
Literature [4]
Cathy Linh Che [5]

Source URL:https://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/2014/4/7/april-lit-projector-cathy-linh-che

Links
[1] http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=1648 [2] http://alicejamesbooks.org/ajb-titles/split/ [3] https://hyphenmagazine.com/categories/poetry [4] https://hyphenmagazine.com/tags/literature [5] https://hyphenmagazine.com/tags/cathy-linh-che