Self-Portrait in a Wire Jacket
To section off
is to intensify,
to deaden.
Some surfaces
cannot be salvaged.
Leave them
to lose function,
to persist only
as armature,
holding in place
those radiant
squares
of sensation—
the body a dichotomy
of flesh and
blood. Wait here
in the trellised
garden you
are becoming.
Soon you’ll know
that the strictures
have themselves
become superfluous,
but at that point
you’ll also know
that ungridded
you could no longer survive.
Copyright © 2013 by Monica Youn. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on August 8, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
"The wire jacket was a Boxer Rebellion-era Chinese torture device that was used to administer the infamous 'death by a thousand cuts.' I encountered its description in Sax Rohmer's The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu, which I was reading as part of a project on Western representations of Asian culture. More abstractly, for me the wire jacket represented the consequences of living for too long under a system of constraint—how adaptation can involve an irrevocable, though self-imposed, loss of freedom."
—Monica Youn
Monica Youn
Monica Youn grew up in Houston, Texas. She received a BA from Princeton University, a JD from Yale Law School, and an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.