too much - a love letter of mourning to people of the Asian diaspora

Drawing of Xiao Zhen Xie (pictured above) and poem by Learkana Chong

there is too much rage to fit inside this poem.

there is too much devastation,

too much broken heart and bone,

too much swollen eyes and pooling blood

too much bruised and rotted flesh

too much desecrated motherland

too much, too much

to lay out in this colonized tongue

when diaspora is just a flayed carcass

that maps out all our traumas

when intergenerational trauma

is the pain of our ancestors bleeding into us

when grief is just another love language

when death is just another day

when their guns and raised fists

are given more reverence

than our weeping elders and mothers.

i am nothing more than a gaping wound these days

a half-strangled cry,

a ghost ripped from the decaying bodies of our people—

it hurts, it hurts too much, too much

this poem cannot hold my fury

this tongue cannot hold my hurt

this heart cannot hold

it hurts, too much.