‘The Hunted Body’ & ‘Fireworks’
Lindsay Liang is a New York–based interdisciplinary artist and printmaker whose work explores memory, spatial distortion, and the residue of perception. She fuses analog techniques with digital processes, often drawing inspiration from neuroscience, literature, and fragments of place.
The Hunted Body
I woke up with him inside me. The air tense,
smelling of maniacal lust,
and broken pride.
“I don’t want this”
I told him the next day in the bedroom,
tucking bread between my teeth and
staring at the mold on the wall.
“I don’t want this” — echoed,
over and over again, me dumbly believing
that he’ll stop hunting me at night.
I woke up again.
I hated my body —
it found pleasure,
it liked the feeling,
it didn’t cooperate with me,
it took his side.
It betrayed me.
He didn’t believe me.
“You’ve enjoyed it”,
he used to tell me
the next day, his spikey, sandpaper hands touching
my soft skin,
I felt it crack like thin ice under pressure.
I didn’t have proof.
I didn’t need it,
but back then he convinced me that I did.
My body wasn’t at fault.
Now, in my room filled with the
smell of lilac flowers and
dignity,
I know not to forgive
the unforgivable;
with saxophone music on,
as I silently read the email
of the scarecrow of the past,
I know not to give second chances after
the irredeemable.
People don’t change
even if you love them enough.
I left when my body desired another man,
when it couldn’t stand the idea of being touched by him.
The body he took for granted,
the body he mistreated,
the body that I thought betrayed me,
finally took my side.
I claimed it back and now it belongs to me.
Fireworks
Thousand fireworks set off my cheek
when his rough dry palm hit it.
My tears didn’t extinguish them.
I saw before my eyes what dinosaurs saw
on the asteroid impact.
“I had to calm you down”,
I heard him say
in the old soviet kitchen, decorated with faded wallpaper
and brown linoleum of the colour of our relationship.
I reasoned, I explained,
I tried to get my power back.
All I got was the smell of freshly cooked basil.
I wish someone told me
I don’t need to beg.
Love does not beat.
Love is an Elvis Presley song,
not a walk through Jurassic Park.
Yet, for a year more, I stayed.
Weak.
Years later, dancing on my dark wood parquet floor,
with light ivory walls evoking the taste of safety,
I don't breathe in fear,
in the room filled with red tulips,
I write my own version of
“Love Me Tender”.
Tanya Moldovan is an emerging writer who lives in her home country Moldova. She started writing after losing both her parents to cancer. Her poetry has been published in The Word’s Faire, Festival for Poetry, and the Beyond Words international magazine. Her work focuses on the subjects of death, grief and the experience after death.
