throat. gorges. the glottal stop rising into my nose.

Rita Wong. "lips shape yangtze, change jiang, river longing"

"the heaviness of signing on the black dotted line
when you cannot read what you've signed"

"missed the boat, even as we step off it"

Wong's poem is haunting and accusatory - though the accused is not readily apparent within the text - as she writes about the experience of disapora, of displacement; of being of the "dispossessed". There is a prevalence of suffocating imagery, from the aforequoted "heaviness of signing" to also the "sound of rocks filling your mouth" and the "clouds suffocate me" sensation. These suffocating and oppressing sensations are tied to the idea of a loss of memory, and the idea of movement increasing freedom is disrupted as the experience is not a freeing but rather a chaining one in this poem.

That paradox is evident in the last line, "missed the boat, even as we step off it", as the boat that has been missed is the symbolic one denoting freedom to a more open landscape where it is possible to claim location, whereas the actual experience was one deeply and meaningfully traumatic. The reality of dislocation and diaspora - the darker aspect to it, the sensation of being dislocated and of being denied cultural/familial/personal memories - is brought into open discourse by Wong, who refers and defers back to the place where the subject of the poem is being displaced from.