A History of Domestication
Put your name in a hat, or a volcano:
Your sense of time is inadequate:
While I sleep my secret face faces the other way:
Grief is a heated iron comb:
The kerosene of grief, it doesn’t age well, it degrades:
Grief is a kind of time:
Sign your name. Become a series of signals:
Holes punched through a rag. Make a space to look through:
Your eye is a hole, too:
Your iris constricts a telegraphy of the future:
Strange deliveries:
The midwifery of anything here:
Trade this hide for sod:
At night I dream of an infant made of flour and heat:
We dream of the castaway wind inside us:
At night my throat dresses itself in green feathers:
It does. You do:
Copyright © 2020 by Sun Yung Shin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 29, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is part of my forthcoming collection, The Wet Hex, and in it, I attempt to explore how climate threat and mass extinction may affect our social relations, our sense of death and the afterlife/underworld, and how we think of violence in our species, informed by scholar Donna Haraway’s concept of the Chthulucene. In her essay ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene,’ published in e-flux, Journal #75, she writes ‘The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitalocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.’ I think a lot about time and dreams and violence against women, so these are in this poem as well as the post-humanist priority of decentering the human as the hub of reality. More obviously, the way many patriarchal human societies have domesticated animals cannot be separated from the way women have been treated. Issues of reproduction, replication, and resurrection occupy me, and I am considering the future of reproduction, which may include the death of birth as we once knew it.”
—Sun Yung Shin
Sun Yung Shin
신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is the author of The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press, 2022) and Unbearable Splendor (Coffee House Press, 2016). She co-directs Poetry Asylum alongside Su Hwang and lives in Minneapolis.