A bird and a stone

I write to you once again from a floor in Chicago, a city I once spent eighteen years becoming the person I am in, in the living room of a woman who has immeasurably changed my life.

There is tea here and the clouds are out today, but yesterday it was 50 degrees, at least, and sunny all over the place, and because the way February tends to go in this city, the people were feral. Arms full of flowers and everywhere, outside, lingering. I saw multiple men’s bare knees.

There’s such a midwestern decadence to an unseasonably warm winter day.

The day I married my friend Kyle, eleven years ago last month, it was 55 degrees and sunny in St. Louis. I woke up before sunrise weeping, overwhelmed by all of it, uncertain that it and by it i mean anything would work—the careful timing of the day, planned to the minute, the antique typewriter with unreliable ribbon, the promise to make the best of myself for love for the rest of my life. I went to bed 24 hours later, weeping this time with laughing too. For me, the god tier feeling.

We’d been so loved that day. Every drop of liquor gone, my dress destroyed by dancing, a dog called Bacon at the hotel pub where the afterparty gathered and a dozen pizzas maybe more magically materialized near midnight (it wasn’t magic, it was Michael, who moves quietly and well). My friend who I married smiling with his whole face and a taxidermy grizzly bear in the corner of the lobby, on two legs baring his teeth. The typewriter had in fact broken.

It didn't matter much. It was a good party.

I have never had an easy time of love. Something I’m working through with three different therapists. There is something inside of me I cannot quite live with and it’s been eating at me steadily since we left Chicago coming up on three years ago. As ready as we were to leave. As much as I wanted what I said I did—to try, to go west again, closer to my family, closer to the sky and mountains, closer to the place my family’s family has been for fifteen thousand years.

It’s astonishing to think.

We invented words and made them hateful to describe people who have survived millennia by moving with the seasons, by adapting to the changing conditions of the only planet, as far as we know, to have made mycelium and mangos. I made a life in Chicago, found my people here, and I get to keep them still. It takes a few hours to get to them now, but I don’t mind. There’s always a book. Ever since I stopped bringing my phone into the bedroom, there’s usually at least two. It’s nice to read like this again. It’s nice to spend my time learning how language works and moves, how the process of processing someone else’s imagined worlds and careful words reaches some well within me that makes me cry and kiss the earth, to consider the millions of ways billions of souls have found a way to live. Someone throw me a pizza party, I love to read. Even more so these days as I’ve been advised by at least two therapists—maybe all three if i’m picking up the subtext—to ease up on introspection. To be a little less consumed by my own mind, to take steps every day to return to my body, a place I punished for most of my life. It was frightening at first, being asked to notice me. Where the feelings live, how I feel frustration as a rope tightening at my jaw, making my voice climb out of my belly and come from the top of my throat, how the strain of it leaves me aching in the tender spot where my neck meets my skull and if I’m not careful wraps its hands around my head and pulses into my right eye and I’m down for the count for two to twenty four hours. It was frightening to begin practicing bilateral stimulation, activating both sides of the brain to make a centimeter more space, just enough to interrupt and de-escalate the typical flow of thought:

something isn’t right here, it makes no sense to me, i do not feel safe, it is because someone here has decided i am not good enough to care for, it is because i am difficult to understand & talk too much & laugh too loud & i'm obscene & no one can make sense of me or what i'm doing here, the way i look, what i say and do & am, there is nowhere in the world that wants me & i am weak to be wanted & full of blood & someone here will smell it & they’ll taunt me, diminish & degrade me, peck at my fragility, make me small enough to stop mattering, the only way to make me matter is to bend myself into compliance, pleasantry, servility & silence, the only way to make me matter is to make me less, but i will not do it mother fuckers, i have made myself quiet in enough rooms to understand that everyone in here is hurting & i have seen the strings tightening at their throats & i have seen how men make monsters of themselves & shadows of others & a shell of the only planet to make mycelium and mangos & now i must be bigger, louder, meaner, madder, this is where i bare my teeth, if you want my blood i'll come for yours, i have studied my own shame & i can find yours too, if you want to hurt me i will hunt you down & feast on every flaw you’ve ever shown me & the ones you didn’t want to, this is justice now, me firing & using every word i know to make men smaller, to make me right & invulnerable, i will not be hurt again, except oh god, where is my heart, has anyone seen my sweetness, softness, the child i once was, who am i if i’m vengeful, if it’s anger at the wheel then where is my sense, my peace, & oh where is my laughter, will i ever feel silly again, how do i get me back to me, oh god something isn’t right here—

etc. etc.

The therapy helps. Trained professionals are helping me look more gently at my fury and I'm trying really hard to stop the spiral and find myself in here. I left everyone who loved me best in a city I loved and wanted to leave. I am closer to my family now and closer to the sky. I am closer to okay than I was a year ago. I am trying to write it down again.

I came back to Chicago for the long weekend to celebrate five years of being in business with my friend who I started a business with five years ago. I am sitting on her floor telling you what I can about how it has been. I am drinking her tea, looking up every few minutes to remember to breathe and to look at the clouds. I cannot see them moving but I know that they are.

It was a beautiful morning to celebrate. Feral in February and sunny all over the place. Over three hours, fifty or so of our beloveds joined us over pastries from our friend’s Palestinian bakery and coffee in a brilliant indigo blue building on a block in North Lawndale, a neighborhood that boomed after the city burnt down in the late 19th century then redlined into near-destitution after the Civil Rights Movement. There’s a park around the corner that was originally named for a Civil War-era politician who fought to bring slavery to Illinois. The name has since been changed to honor the Abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Since 2021, grassroots coalitions have followed strategies from the Black Panther Party and restorative justice frameworks to improve food access and return $3-7 to the community for every dollar invested. In 2022, gun violence dropped by 58%. In 2024, a pair of brothers bought the building to function as a “fourth place,” a space for collective liberation practice. There’s a free grocery in the foyer for SNAP recipients, locals come to co-work in front of the coffee bar in the middle, and in the back there is a sunlit room that a small business, say, could affordably rent to host a bunch of people to party about their business.

It was a good party.

Our friends brought flowers, we gave away zines, printed on risograph by a Chicano-owned press. Ramadan begins next week, as does Lent and Lunar New Year, Pisces season too. The air was all kindness and curiosity, sunlit and sweet. I hugged old comrades close, met a journalist with the Marshall Project whose whose community newsletter spotlights arts and culture from Chicago's Global South diaspora, a clothier who hand-cuts tailored suits, and a friend of Nermin’s who took my chapbook on a trip to Kyrgyzstan last summer where two locals requested a hilltop photoshoot with it.

This is what life is like for me this instant. My life, the thing I sometimes struggle to have faith in, the thing that sends me spiraling into a dark room with walls made of knives where I get stuck on occasion and cannot see the window. It is good and necessary for me to remember, this too is my life, a sunlit room in a neighborhood determined to determine itself in the city I spent time becoming me in and nineteen years ago first made a friend I ended up falling deeply in love with, on a planet of mushrooms and mangos and bears, where we perfected trauma and invented typewriters and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, a place I can follow a need for the sky, to be closer to family, a place my family’s family and thousands of millions of others have lived for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.

It’s astonishing to think.

There's More

I've been busy. The studio turned five. My hope is in our sixth year, we inch a little closer to stability.

Emily has taken me under her wing as she launches her business, facilitating writing and mindful movement workshops for new and practicing poets. This June we're bringing Gabrielle Calvocoressi to Santa Fe for a weekend retreat. I think you should come.

I've a chapbook manuscript out on submission—first rejection came from Sixth Finch, though I made the list of finalists. I have a nice feeling about that.

Nermin and I made a zine, give us your address if you want one. I may not be the one to mail it. I’m still not great at mail.

There’s another zine I’ve been tinkering with for a small group of homies I went on a weeklong retreat with last fall. That one's slow-going because I have been slower-going than I even knew I could be. But I have the long stapler and all the right paper.

I had a poem in the latest issue of Mizna. One in Okay Donkey, which got a Pushcart nod, another in The Maine Review, and some shorties in Burial and The Michigan City Review. Always Crashing was kind enough to nominate my poem that's a list of deaths by bear for a Pushcart too, that was cool as hell, and Epiphany sent up nectarine season for Best of the Net consideration. Last weekend I read a few things at the release of Never Angeline North's latest collection, Black Hole Science is Filled with Apologies, which was so fucking excellent for my heart. Never and I were baby poets together in Chicago years and years ago. These days she has a birding blog that reminds me how to breathe. It's been a nice life, these past few years, with poems.

Currently I'm working with the good homie Jared to make a ten-track poetry album, featuring some of my favorite publications from 2025 along with birdsong and synthesizer, which will be available this spring via Bandcamp. Those of you with paid subscriptions to this newsletter will get it free. Everyone else can pay what you want. So far it is very beautiful. I cannot wait to share it.

I have every intention to return to this animal this year, to become consistent once again, once a month at the very least if not every other week, to spend as much time as I possibly can writing and becoming a home in my body and making dope shit with my friends. It's all I want to do—that and feel the sun on my face.

Oh look. The clouds have moved.

Anyway, here's a (bit of a) poem.

There is a bird and a stone
in your body. Your job is not
to kill the bird with the stone.

Victoria Chang